coldandsleepy cooks

Two dinners... (Early Days #2 & 3)

2012-01-31T19:59:00.000-08:00

Quick post!

Things are still going well here with the new baby. The Emperor is starting to return to normal, for which we're all thankful. He and Josh are heading out to go to a wedding at Disney (the one in Florida, I have no idea which one is "land" and which one is "world") on Thursday and Wren and I will be staying home. My mother-in-law, who is a really lovely person, has come to stay with us while the gentlemen are gone. (I always feel sad for people who have troublesome or unpleasant in-laws. The troublesome/unpleasant people are all on *my* side of the family.) Should be time for a little blogging but we'll see...

I cooked dinner two nights in a row! So I've now made dinner um... 3 out of the 9 nights that I've been home since the little guy was born. 1/3rd. Not bad. Not quite back to normal, but we're working on it.

Here's last night's:

Baked sweet potato fries with smoked paprika, and tofu and bok choy sauteed in soy sauce and fresh orange juice.

And here's tonight's:

The Oh She Glows squash mac'n'cheez with steamed fresh broccoli. Tasty. I always buy frozen broccoli because I have convinced myself that it's just as good, especially for mixing in things which is what I usually do with it... but this fresh broccoli was so delicious that I wonder if maybe I've just been lying to myself about the broc. Hmm.

And in case you forgot what they look like, here are the little gentlemen:

The Emperor in a truck.

The baby... sleeping. SURPRISE.

Noodles with sauce (Early days #1)

2012-01-26T20:30:00.000-08:00

Hey there internet! Guess what I did today? I cooked dinner! Exactly one week after cooking dinner for the last time before popping out that new baby. (Who still doesn't have an internet nickname. I'm really failing on this front.) Nothing too terribly exciting, but it was good to make something... I literally spent the rest of the day sleeping and nursing, sleeping and nursing. Which is quite pleasant, to be honest. I've found these early days quite relaxing this time around. I have no idea why I feel so differently than I did when the Emperor was a newborn-- I was on the edge of hysterics more or less constantly when he was tiny and definitely did not feel well rested or cheerful a week into it.

Anyhow, foooooood!

Just some brown rice noodles with red sauce (jarred) and spinach (frozen), and some broth bread. Broth bread? It's like garlic bread, except that I didn't have any garlic powder so I used broth powder.

Funny story... I realized we were out of garlic powder so I decided to use some vegetable broth I found in the spice drawer. Now, whenever I buy powdered broth, I take a minute to write the reconstitution info on the bag somewhere. You know, 1 tbsp powder + 1 c of water or whatever. It varies by brand, and I like to be able to see it right there when I go to make some broth. So I thought it was a little strange when I pulled out this bag of broth and it didn't have anything written on it.

I figured that Josh must have bought it (happens sometimes) and not written the instructions on it... so I go ahead and start sprinkling it on the bread. About 2/3rds of the way through, I think to myself: this broth smells really bizarre. Sort of... sweet? Huh.

And then I taste it.

It's not broth powder.

It's chickpea flour.

Ooops.

Well, I shook it off and found some actual broth powder and the toast was edible, so all's well that ends well. And I laughed pretty hard on realizing I was starting my return to the kitchen with a near disaster.

Speaking of minor disasters, heh... here's a lovely photograph of the Emperor looking like he's just crawled out of a cave somewhere:

And here's one of that other guy too:

Leftover casserole, latchkey lime pie, and oh, this guy... (Still Baking #19/#20)

2012-01-23T10:19:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed my absence... that's because I went into labor on Thursday afternoon while making this:

And this:

And on Friday, this guy was born:

The first thing is a casserole made of Latin-themed leftovers we had on hand-- some tomato sauce flavored with cumin and oregano, a layer of polenta, a layer of leftover black bean filling, a layer of black bean-nooch sauce dip, and finally, some crushed tortilla chips. We ate it with homemade guac on top.

The second thing is Latchkey Lime Pie from the PPK blog. I made a cinnamon cookie crust that's not GF, but the filling is GF and would taste delicious in anything. Highly recommended. (Though next time I'll bump up the zest.)

The third thing is Wren! The Emperor's little brother! He doesn't have an internet nickname yet... I'll get back to you guys on that.

We got home from the hospital yesterday afternoon and things have been pretty smooth so far. The Emperor is handling the situation with as much grace and aplomb as a 2 year old possibly can, which is to say... some grace. Some aplomb.

I'm hoping to return to blogging (with a new theme!) by the end of the month at the latest. We'll see!

In the meantime, here's a late daily Emperor! With company!

Pizza night! (Still Baking #18)

2012-01-18T19:01:00.001-08:00

Technically I think this only the 16th thing I've baked this month, but bear with me, people! Skipping days mixes me all up.

The Emperor and I had a great day today... library, two parks, visit to Josh at work, coffee date, long walk, long nap, all in one day (though not in quite that order). And then, as if that wasn't enough! We ended the day by making pizza at home!

Well, this is semi-homemade, anyway. The crust is the whole wheat dough from TJ's fridge section. It's topped with a little plain tomato sauce, a sprinkling of Daiya, and a sprinkling of TJ's soyrizo. Tasty tasty. The Emperor usually refuses pizza these days but he gobbled this up and kept telling us how much he loved it. I think he eats more at home on days he doesn't go to preschool... I think they must give him huge portions or something because I keep stuffing food in him and he keeps asking for more.

Here's a random picture of him during out adventures today:

No baking tonight...

2012-01-17T19:38:00.000-08:00

My stomach's in despair again. (Again!) I never get any sort of stomach upset in my normal life, and I have to tell you, it's one aspect of pregnancy I will absolutely not miss.

While I don't have any food to share, I did still get a great picture of the Emperor pulling a sour face at bedtime. Here he is:

Delicata & black bean roastadas (Still Baking #16)

2012-01-16T19:07:00.000-08:00

Still pregnant. Not much to say on the non-food front other than that!

So today I finally got around to making something I have been DYING to make for this month's blog series: some tostadas made with baked delicata squash. Once again, I owe this dish's inspiration to Terry Hope Romero's Viva Vegan cookbook. Man, I love that book. This is my take on the butternut & black eyed pea tostadas recipe, using techniques and ingredients I had on hand. I'm calling them "roastadas" because unlike normal tostadas, the tortillas are very very lightly fried and then baked rather than deep fried. (I am terrified of deep frying.)

Delicata & black bean roastadas
Makes 8 (serves 4ish, with copious leftover black bean mixture)

Squash layer:
3 delicata squash, halved & seeded
canola oil for spraying/lightly brushing
kosher salt for sprinkling
chile powder for sprinkling
1 tsp olive oil

Black bean layer:
1 large onion, finely diced
5 cloves garlic, minced
3 serrano peppers, minced
1 can diced tomatoes
half a bunch of cilantro, minced
2 cans cooked black beans
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cumin

Tortillas:
8 small corn tortillas
canola oil for spraying/lightly brushing

Toppings:
vegan cheese for sprinkling on top (optional)
1 avocado, sliced (optional)

1. First start the delicata layer: preheat the oven to 425F.
2. Put the delicata in a baking pan, cut side up. Lightly spray with canola oil (or brush), then salt very lightly, then sprinkle with chile powder to taste.
3. Bake delicata squash for 30 minutes. Start black bean layer when you put squash in the oven.
Note: leave the oven ON when you take the squash out.
4. Use a spoon to scrape the baked delicata out of its peel; this should be very very easy. If it's not, they're not baked enough. (Note: you can eat the peel if you want, and I usually do, but I think it would not be great for the texture of the mash.)
5. Use a potato masher or a fork to mash up the delicata into a fairly smooth paste. If it seems to dry, stir in the olive oil.

6. Black bean layer: spray a saucepan with canola oil (or put in about 1 tsp) and heat up over medium heat.
7. Add in the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes.
8. Add the garlic and serranos and cook another 2 minutes or so, til fragrant.
9. Mix in tomatoes, cilantro, black beans, salt, and cumin. Stir well.
10. Use a potato masher (or similar implement) to mash up the contents of the pan. You're going for a slightly chunky liquid with bits (onions and cilantro, maybe a few stray beans).
11. Cook for 10 minutes or until somewhat thickened; you want it to be slightly more liquidy than refried beans typically are, but along those lines. While it's cooking down, start the tortilla steps.
Note: you will have a LOT of leftover filling-- about 3c. I didn't want to put half a can of tomatoes in the fridge is all.

12. Tortillas: spray a cast iron (or maybe nonstick?) pan lightly with canola oil and heat over medium heat.
13. Line a baking sheet with tin foil.
14. Add tortillas 2 at a time and cook until slightly crispy, about 1 minute per side. As each set of tortillas finish cooking, place them on the baking sheet. They will not be as crispy as a deep fried tostada, but they shouldn't be limp or floppy either.

15. Assembly: divide the delicata mash evenly between your 8 tortillas and use a spatula to spread filling out to the edges. (I didn't measure, but I'd say I used about 1/4-1/3 c mash for each tortilla.)
16. Now add a layer of the black bean mixture and use a spatula to spread that filling evenly over the squash layer.
17. Add a light sprinkling of vegan cheese (I used cheddar Daiya) on top of each roastada.
18. Put in oven and bake 10 minutes or until cheese gets melty.
19. Remove from oven and top with avocado slices.

Phew. That's a lot of steps. But it actually came together quite easily, and it was soooo yummy. The delicata layer is so sweet and lovely next to the spicy black bean layer. Yummers.

Not convinced? Look at how good these squash looked:

Josh and I really enjoyed this, though they were suuuuper filling and we had a hard time getting through 2 each. The Emperor ate one bite of the black bean layer and one (separate) bite of the delicata layer-- he told me the black beans were too spicy and the delicata squash was too warm. Then he proceeded to eat an entire avocado and a plain corn tortilla. Hey, whatever works.

He and I had a fun day today, wandering around downtown in the morning and then going to the park in the afternoon. Here he is at the park, engaging in one of his favorite pastimes: playing with sticks:

Vegan pigs in bisquick blankets (Still Baking #15)

2012-01-15T18:08:00.000-08:00

We're halfway through the month of January, and here I still am, still baking things! I have a bunch more ideas, some exciting, some not, but we'll see how many we actually get through...

Tonight's an old favorite: vegan pigs in blankets. These are one of the first foods Josh ever cooked for me. We used to make them with pre-made biscuits (the kind that come in a tube) and Morningstar Farms sausage links, back before they added eggs to those. (Whyyyyy?) They've evolved over the years though, as our diets and tastes and available products have changed.

This version uses Bisquick for the biscuit part. Almost as lazy as the tube biscuits, but actually somewhat less sketchy ingredientswise. The biscuits are wrapped around Smart Dogs... or Tofu Pups... I don't really remember. Whichever were cheaper at Trader Joe's.

We had a pretty lazy day overall... which is good. I think the Emperor and I are going to have some sort of adventure tomorrow, as from now on he'll only have preschool on Tuesdays & Thursdays. So we may as well adventure while the adventuring is good, know what I mean?

Speaking of "adventures"... oy. He fought his nap for an hour and a half today, at which point we just let him get up. Two hours later, he passed out cold while we were driving home from the grocery store. Like so asleep that he didn't even stir when Josh took him out of the car to put him in his bed. Kind of annoying, but also totally adorable. Proof:

Ginger baked pears (Still Baking #14)

2012-01-14T20:04:00.000-08:00

Today's my due date! Well, maybe. It's today or tomorrow. In any case, I'm still here, with fetus still baking away. I go back and forth between feeling very, very close and feeling like I am going to be pregnant forever. The first one is more likely, really, but... you know how it is.

Tonight I'm kind of phoning it in. I'm not really in the baking mood. To tell the truth, my stomach has been a bit iffy all day and I didn't even want to eat dinner. (I had some crackers instead.) We still have citrus galette left over from the other day, so no need for a new dessert either. We even already have leftover energy bars! So I can't make them (or a variant) again. Grumble grumble.

Instead I decided to do another take on one of the easier things I've done this month, baked apples. I bought a bag of pears at Trader Joe's for suuuuper cheap the other day, but much like the apples I bought there, they just weren't that good on their own. (When will I learn?!) So I'm baking them up tonight, with plans for eating them tomorrow morning. Maybe with... waffles?! Maybe that's a little ambitious, but we'll see where we're at.

In any case, they're still in the oven now. I'll pop a picture into this post tomorrowish, assuming they don't come out totally grotesque. (Picture above.) Same exact idea/execution as the baked apples from the other day, except I couldn't find the cardamom (where is the cardamom?! did I use it all? Usually I can locate it in the kitchen by scent, it smells so strongly. But my nose is giving me nothing and it's not in any of the normal places. Maybe I finished it!) so I subbed in ginger instead. Ginger and pears are good together, right? Well, we'll see how we like it vs the cardamom apples...

We took the Emperor out for a drive today and ended up at one of our favorite parks in the San Jose area, Baylands Park in Sunnyvale. It's been many months since we took him there last, and we discovered that since then, he has learned how to climb up a ladder. So now he can get up this very tall play structure which has essentially a balance beam at the top of it. It looks like it was engineered specifically to scare the crap out of parents. He LOVED it, naturally, and had a great time playing up there while I silently tried not to puke from terror and Josh stood nearby waiting to catch him.

Here's a picture of him on the balance beam-y part, with Josh's head in for reference as to the height of the structure:

No baking tonight...

2012-01-13T19:35:00.000-08:00

Don't worry, I haven't had a baby and forgotten to tell you about it. I'm just not feeling like baking anything today, so I am taking a blogcation until tomorrow!

Well, almost. I did want to give a quick vegan shoutout while I'm posting anyway. Towards the end of October, someone on the PPK linked me to a Kickstarter page for a vegan baker who was trying to raise funds for a commercial oven in order to open a vegan baked goods kitchen in a coffee shop in Milwaukee of all places. It sounded like such a sweet (no pun intended) project to me that I gave $25-- not a ton but hey, every bit counts, right? Today I received an awesome little thank you package in the mail with some stuff from the bakery, Compassionate Cake. (The coffee shop they sell at is Brewing Grounds for Change, which you can find on Facebook.)

Obviously I can't speak to the actual location as I'm on the other side of the country, but I can tell you that the treats they mailed me-- an assortment of vegan cookies-- are bangin'. The Emperor and I split a cinnamon-sugar biscotti, and as soon as I took a bite of it, I regretted agreeing to share it with him. That's right. It was so good, I didn't want to share it with my 2 year old. That's meaningful!

Anyway, if you're in the Milwaukee area, go eat something there and tell me about it!

Mixed citrus galette (Still Baking #12)

2012-01-12T19:42:00.000-08:00

Do you ever wonder why it is that no one bakes with oranges? I think about this often. It seems so weird when you consider that other citrus-- lemons, limes, even grapefruits-- end up in baked desserts all the time. But you almost never see oranges in baking. I think maybe it's because they haven't got that strong of a flavor, or perhaps they're too... watery? I don't know. But every now and again I like to make a dessert with them anyway just to play around.

I bought 5 lbs of navel oranges for $5 at the farmer's market yesterday... they're so sweet and yummy and good that the Emperor and I ate three of them between the two of us for breakfast this morning. I used another five (!) in this dessert so we're already halfway through our oranges. Maybe I should have bought 10 lbs after all.

Here's what I made with them:

It's a galette with a layer of mixed citrus (several lemons from our tree, a cara cara orange, and two navels) curd topped with slices of lemon and orange. The recipe is not quite right yet so I'm not posting it (also I am very lazy). It's yummy but just not spot on.... I think I would have liked more lemon and less orange and probably less curd over all. The orange seems REALLY sweet to me, though everyone else in the house thought it was right on.

It's a good concept though, and one I'll have to work on...

Finally, daily Emperor:

Baked everything for dinner! (Still Baking #11)

2012-01-11T18:18:00.000-08:00

Today I couldn't decide on something to bake. Then it hit me: bake ALL THE THINGS. I had a lovely trip to the farmer's market with friend Sophia and her gentleman, and then I came home and foraged around to see just how much of last week's produce I had left. Actually, I didn't have as much stuff as I thought I did, which was mildly disappointing (since I mostly bought oranges this week... sweet, sweet oranges), but I DID find some great things to bake. Enough to get me through to the weekend at least, and enough to bake a ton of stuff tonight!

Namely: a sweet potato and some broccoli! And some tofu. Here's the resulting plate:

Sweet potato - I cut it into wedges, tossed them with 2 tsps of olive oil and baked at 400F for 35 minutes, then broiled for about 5 minutes on my broiler's low setting. I read somewhere that they stay crispier if you salt them after roasting, so I tested that theory and I'm suitably convinced. They weren't as mushy as when I roast them with salt on them first.

Broccoli - tossed with another tsp of olive oil and some salt (added pre-roasting), then roasted for 15 minutes.

Tofu - cut into sticks, tossed with about a tbsp soy sauce, a tsp sriracha, a tsp olive oil, juice and zest of one navel orange, and 2 tbsps water (it was a little too salty/spicy without), then baked at 400F for 35 minutes. Took it out right before I broiled the sweet potato wedges, and it was perfect.

I also made a creamy sriracha dipping sauce for the sweet potato fries. So technically we did eat something that wasn't baked. It was yummy though, so shhhhh.

The Emperor liked and ate all of it. I had put his plate on the table right before he got home from preschool and he ran to the table to see what we were having for dinner... saw the sweet potatoes on his plate... and shouted "OOOOH! We're having FRENCH FRIES!" then added "And BROCCOLI!" with equal enthusiasm. He too declared all components of the meal yummy.

Speaking of yummy, look at this snack I had earlier:

That was an amazing pomelo.

And speaking of amazing, I never fail to be amazed by how much we generate in the way of fruit/vegetable scraps. This is ONE meal worth of compostables:

Vegans make the flowers grow! Well, these vegans make my landlords' flowers grow, anyway. (It's a good trade.)

While I'm posting a ton of photos, how about one of my crazy belly? Look at this thing. It's out of control:

I was in a greater amount of despair about my appearance by this point in my pregnancy with the Emperor, so I didn't take any pictures. That's kinda sad. I'd like to be able to compare.

And finally, of course, here is the Emperor, throwing his head back with glee and almost falling out of my lap as a result:

Baked individual hash browns! (Still Baking #10)

2012-01-10T18:11:00.000-08:00

Today ought to have added up to a great day for me-- I had a wonderful long bike ride in amazing weather, I spent several hours doing deep cleaning/reorganization stuff that I've been trying to find time to do for months, and I watched old Project Runway episodes. But thanks to the crazy hormonal rollercoaster I've been on for the past week or two (after a fairly even-tempered pregnancy), I am just down in the dumps all the same. SO bummed out that I didn't even want to make myself a dessert to cheer up. So instead: baked potatoes.

But cheer up, internet. Don't *you* be sad about this. They're GOOD potatoes. Lookit:

They're the baked hashbrowns from Vegan Brunch. This is a recipe I've passed over several times because I always think "oh I already know how to make hashbrowns." But I love the idea of doing individual servings rather than one huge pan of hashbrown, and well, they're a baked item so what the hey. I decided to give it a go.

I only made a half batch which was wise-- we ate them with tofu scramble and sauteed kale and despite our combined eating effort (the Emperor ate them too!) we still had 2 of the 6 left. They turned out really tasty, and I actually enjoyed them more than many greasy pan hashbrowns I've had over the years.

And I have to admit, there's something that always cheers me up about breakfast for dinner... I may not be back to 100% cheerfulness but I do feel a little better.

Here's the Emperor reading before bed. This is his FAVORITE book lately. I don't like reading it to him (just not that into poo related books) but he and Josh have a great time with it.

Secret squash energy bars (Still Baking #9)

2012-01-09T19:56:00.001-08:00

Okay, so this morning I got up with the Emperor and sat down to eat breakfast with him. Upon seeing leftover scone on his plate, his lip began trembling. Yes! Really! He gave me a 2 year old lip tremble! "Mommy, I don't want a scone for breakfast. I want a bar. Remember, we made bars? I want a bar."

And for the briefest glimmer of a moment, I felt like super mean mom as I informed him that we did not have any bars and he would be forced to eat a scone instead. Then I came to my senses and remembered that if it were just Josh at home with him, he'd be eating slices of dried mango and rice cakes for breakfast and that he is by no means underprivileged because he had to eat a SCONE of all things for breakfast!

But I *did* take it as an excuse to make more energy bars tonight after he went to bed. I played around with the ingredients enough that I want to record them again. I'm not going to write out the steps because they're basically the same as for the cranberry chocolate chip energy bars I posted last week.

GF Chocolate-cranberry energy bars... with secret squash!
makes 12 smallish bars

1c oats (regular)
1c steel cut oats (because I accidentally bought these when I meant to buy more normal oats!)
1/4c almond meal
2 tbsps soy flour
4 tbsps quinoa flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4c chocolate chips
1/2c dried cranberries
1 tsp cinnamon

1/2c peanut butter
1/4c agave nectar
1 1/4c canned butternut squash (or pumpkin)
------------------

I cut out the dry sugar because I thought they were too sweet last time. And I had half a can of butternut squash left after making the Oh She Glows butternut squash mac'n'cheeze (which is phenomenal! even the Emperor liked it!) for dinner tonight so I figured what the hey, might as well use that as our binder. Just a couple of other little tweaks... these are cooling right now so we'll see how I like them vs the last batch tomorrow. The uncooked batter tasted better though.

Sad to say, I didn't get to spend much time with the Emperor today... I got home late after a doctor appointment and he had to go to bed somewhat early after a busy day of preschool. So about the only time I got to spend with him was pre-bedtime prep-- book reading and tooth brushing. So today's picture is more tooth brushing:

Whole wheat cranberry scones (Still Baking #8)

2012-01-08T20:13:00.001-08:00

Still here! Still pregnant! Today is a small milestone in that I'm now officially a week away from my due date, whether you use the 14th or the 15th. It could be either-- my OB has been using the 14th, I've been giving people the 15th. Whichever you use, I'm a week or less out from it! Which means that in 3 weeks or less, I'll be out the other side.

Yesterday while we were up in Los Gatos, I got a vegan cranberry scone from a coffee shop to eat on the way home because I was starving. The Emperor asked for a bite and proceeded to eat all but 3 small bites of it, which he gave to me over the course of his dining session while telling me "look mommy, I'm sharing. I'm doing a good job of sharing." Yeah, you're doing a great job of sharing... my snack! Oh well. I enjoyed the couple of bites I had of it, and it ended up inspiring today's baked goodies: a batch of cranberry scones for breakfast for the next couple of days!

I wanted to try de-glutenizing these but I chickened out. There's a LOT of flour relative to the other ingredients and I just wasn't up to the challenge at 6:30 a.m., which is when the Emperor woke me up and we started baking these. Maybe next time! They were so yummy that I'd love to be able to make them for anyone on short notice...

This is the basic scone recipe from Vegan Brunch (formerly published in Vegan with a Vengeance, I think) with 1 1/2c dried cranberries mixed in. And whole wheat flour subbed in for the AP. And earth balance for the vegetable shortening because I'm out of shortening. And some lemon extract thrown in because I love lemon extract.

Tasty, not too sweet, and satisfying to everyone in this house. I think the Emperor ate FOUR of them over the course of the day. (I got 18 out of the recipe, though, so these are smaller than some.)

He was in kind of a nutty mood today. I saw this face a LOT:

Baked cardamom apples and vanilla ice cream (Still Baking #7)

2012-01-07T18:27:00.000-08:00

Something simple tonight! I often forget to bake anything with apples because I like to eat them straight up so much. But then I'm always amazed by how freakin' tasty they are if you bake them. Really, doesn't matter what spices you use, whether or not you use additional sugar, etc, there's just something magical about a nice soft baked apple.

These are pretty all-out for baked apples. They're a nice way to dress up some apples you maybe got from Trader Joe's for $2 for a sack and then realized were kinda light on the flavor compared to the apples you usually eat. Or make them with really good apples for a super decadent apple treat sometime. Your call!

Baked cardamom apples
Serves 5 (or however many apples you make)

5 medium apples
10 tsps brown sugar (or 2 tsps per apple)
2 1/2 tsps cardamom (1/2 tsp per apple)
1 tsp cinnamon (like 1/4 tsp per apple, this one doesn't scale as well... just not a ton of cinnamon)

2 1/2 tsps earth balance or other vegan butter (1/2 tsp per apple)

1. Preheat oven to 400F.
2. Halve the apples and scoop out the seeds.
3. Put about 1/4 tsp earth balance in the emptied out portion of each half. (You want 1/2 tsp spread across the entire apple.)
4. Mix together the rest of the ingredients (sugar, cardamom, cinnamon) in a small bowl.
5. Spread about 1 tbsp of dry filling across one apple (so like 1/2 tbsp per half). Concentrate on the cavity with the EB, but feel free to sprinkle some around on the rest of the apple innard too.
6. Stick apple halves back together, and stand them up on end in a baking dish.
7. Bake for 45 minutes.

They'll look kinda like this when they're done:

That's it! We ate ours with scoops of vanilla soy ice cream from TJ's. Super tasty.

Here's your daily Emperor. We went up to Vasona Lake Park in Los Gatos today-- cool little park with a miniature train and a carousel as well as a gigantic playground. We mostly played on the playground today but also took the train once and rode the horsies once. You can see how excited the Emperor was about the train:

Baked stuffed kabocha squash (Still Baking #6)

2012-01-06T21:38:00.000-08:00

So, last night: long story short, my uterus went CRAZY. I thought perhaps I was in early labor. But after about seven hours of madness, everything suddenly ceased and it's been all quiet on the western (southern?) front since then. Let me tell you, I grow extraordinarily weary of this.

ANYWAY, before that excitement happened, I finally got around to making something I've had in my queue for some time: this lovely kabocha squash that I bought in... hm... October, according to Flickr. Yes, it's THIS kabocha squash:

Really? Maybe I'm confused... I feel like I had Josh buy another one recently and we're back to 0 kabochas on hand now, so maybe it's a different one. I dunno.

I knew I wanted to bake/roast the squash but went back and forth on what to serve with it. Cut it into wedges and serve it as kabocha fries with tofu nuggets and some kale? Roast it and then puree it into soup? Etc. But when I looked around my kitchen and saw that I had two stale ends of bread loaves (the bread from Jan 1st), three partially used bunches of herbs, and some leeks and celery that didn't have a whole lot of life left in them, the answer became obvious: STUFFING!

Baked kabocha with bread stuffing
Serves 4-6

1 medium kabocha squash
canola oil for lightly brushing

1/4c earth balance or an equivalent amount of your favorite cooking oil
6 small leeks sliced
4 ribs celery, diced
1 package TJ's chicken-less strips (8 oz diced tofu would work well here too)

4c cubed stale bread
finely chopped herbs of your choice-- I used most of a bunch of sage, rosemary, and thyme-- divided in half
1 tsp salt
black pepper to taste

1. First, start the squash: preheat the oven to 400F.
2. Slice the kabocha squash in half from top to bottom. Scoop out the guts and set aside. (You can roast the seeds just like pumpkin seeds, but I didn't because I am lazy. To the compost bin!)
3. Lightly brush cut side of the squash with oil, then place cut side down on a prepared baking sheet. The squash will produce liquid as it bakes so I highly recommend a rimmed baking sheet/dish here!
4. Bake for 35 minutes.

5. Now, the stuffing: melt earth balance in a large saute pan over medium-low heat.
6. When EB is melted, increase heat to medium and add in sliced leeks. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes.
7. Add in diced celery and cook another 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.
8. Finally, add in the protein (chicken-less strips or tofu) and half of your chopped herbs, and cook another 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

9. While waiting in steps 6-8, mix together the remaining stuffing ingredients in a large bowl: stale bread, half of the chopped herbs, salt, black pepper.
10. When leek mixture is done cooking, pour/scrape into the bowl with the bread in and it and toss well. It should be somewhat moist-- if it seems bone dry, you can add 2 tbsps of soy milk or a little more earth balance.

11. When the squash has baked for 35 minutes, remove from oven and flip halves over so that they are bowls. Stuff each side with stuffing. You can pack it in as firmly as you please, but your squash will probably be pretty fragile so just be mindful that you're not splitting open the sides.
12. Bake for another 10 minutes, or until stuffing is browned on top.
----------------

We found that a quarter of a squash (half of one of the halves) made for a hearty dinner for each adult. Like so:

It turned out really yummy. To our surprise, the Emperor liked it too-- he tried everything except the celery and didn't freak out about the fact that there were like, herbs, TOUCHING THE REST OF HIS FOOD. This is big, people. He expressed mixed feelings about the squash itself-- "I don't know if this is yummy"-- but loved the cooked bread and chicken-less strips.

Here is a picture I snapped of him in bed. It's not very good but like I mentioned, I was pretty distracted at the time. It does capture our recent bedtime zeitgeists though:

Footie jammies (glow in the dark dinosaurs), Funny Baby, water bottle, and an awesome red quilt one of Josh's former co-workers made for him. All the important things for bedtime.

Tapioca Macaroon Pie (Still Baking #5)

2012-01-05T20:29:00.001-08:00

Today wasn't great for me. I was just very glum all day, didn't do much of consequence, felt physically crummy towards the end of the day. It was definitely a day where I needed a pick me up.

So naturally... I made pie!

I have to tell you that the photographs of this pie are really horrid, and I know that. But it is SO GOOD that I hope you'll consider giving it a try anyway. The crust is a variation on this one I found on Eat the Cookie. Oh man, I found that blog from random googling and I am SO excited to browse through it now-- though not a solely vegan blog, it looks like it has a ton of vegan yummies.

Tapioca Macaroon Pie
makes 1 9" pie

Macaroon crust:
1/4c soy-free Earth Balance (or your choice of vegan butter)
3 tbsps agave nectar
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp lemon extract
1c finely shredded unsweetened coconut
1c almond meal
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Tapioca filling:
1 can full-fat coconut milk
1/4c water
3 tbsps tapioca pearls
3 tbsps tapioca flour
1/2c finely shredded unsweetened coconut
pinch of salt
1/4c sugar
1 tsp vanilla

1. First make the crust: preheat the oven to 350F and lightly grease a 9" pie plate.
2. Place Earth Balance & agave nectar in small saucepan over low heat and cook, whisking occasionally, until EB is melted.
3. While EB/agave combo cooks, mix together the dry ingredients (coconut, almond meal, baking powder, salt) in a mixing bowl.
4. When EB is melted, remove pan from heat and whisk in the vanilla and lemon extracts.
5. Pour the liquid in the bowl of dry ingredients and use a spatula to mix well.
6. Press mixture into a thin, even layer in your pie plate.
7. Cook for 14 minutes or until crust is a light, toasty brown and smells amazing.
8. Cool for about an hour.

9. While the crust is cooling, make the tapioca filling: combine all ingredients except vanilla in a saucepan and allow to soak (to soften tapioca) for at least 30 minutes.
10. Heat over medium-low heat until bubbling. It will thicken VERY quickly-- mine started to get pretty thick before it even started to bubble.
11. Once bubbling, cook for about 3 more minutes, stirring constantly. Taste for doneness (who wants undercooked tapioca?) and provided it's not crunchy, remove from heat.
12. Whisk in your vanilla extract.

13. Pour tapioca filling into macaroon crust, smooth down with spatula, and put the whole thing in the fridge to set for at least 30 minutes.

Here's another picture of a single slice of this:

Ugh, SO good. Why have I never put tapioca in pie before?! I think this would be extra great with a layer of citrus curd in there somewhere-- perhaps a very thin layer between crust and tapioca. It's really tasty as is, though.

Finally, here's your daily Emperor. He's looking very serious while eating his dinner:

Three Corn Casserole (Still Baking #4)

2012-01-04T19:16:00.000-08:00

Today I had my first day of maternity leave, and it was blissful. I still woke up at 4:30 a.m. (oops) but lazed on the couch for a few hours afterwards, had a good snuggle with the Emperor, helped him get ready for preschool, went downtown and had a long leisurely coffee and did a bit of knitting, walked for an hour and ended up somewhere in SC I've never been before (Neary Lagoon, a beautiful little wildlife preserve/park), ate a bagel, and went to the farmer's market. At the market, I ran into my friends Amey and Sophia, which was a great surprise! It made a good day even better.

I mentioned that I was buying a few things (no spoilers!) at the market to use in this month's theme and Amey was surprised-- she said she thought I'd be doing all breads and cookies. Ha! Tempting! But I'm baking a few non-sweeties this month too, including tonight's dinner.

This is something I just slapped together but it turned out really well, so I'm going to post the recipe. It owes an inspirational debt to the tortilla casserole recipe in Viva Vegan by Terry Hope Romero, one of my all time favorite cookbooks. I made that tortilla casserole many many moons ago and have thought of it many many times since... this is sort of like a lazier, cornier version of it with stuff I had on hand.

Three Corn Casserole
Serves 6-8

1c prepared enchilada sauce
1c leftover spaghetti sauce
(or another combo of red sauces, it doesn't really matter)
1 bunch swiss chard, chopped

1 batch cashew ricotta from Veganomicon
(or 2c of your favorite tofu/nut ricotta)

6 small corn tortillas
1 tube prepared polenta
1/2c coarsely crushed tortilla chips

1. Preheat oven to 375F and get out a large baking dish (I used a large oval dish, but your standard 9x13 should work here as well).
1. Combine your sauces and swiss chard in a saucepan over medium heat and bring to a simmer.
2. Simmer til swiss chard is tender and sauces are combined, about 5 minutes.
3. Remove sauce from heat.
4. Spoon about 1/2c of your sauce into bottom of baking dish.
5. Lay down 2 of the corn tortillas.
6. Spread a layer of cashew ricotta over the tortillas.
7. Crumble a layer of polenta on top of the ricotta.
8. Pour another 1/2c of sauce over the polenta layer.
9. Repeat steps 5-8 til you run out of sauce. You should have some cashew ricotta leftover at this point.
10. Cover baking dish with tinfoil and bake for 20 minutes.
11. Pull dish out and plop on the remaining ricotta by the small spoonful.
12. Sprinkle crushed chips over the top of the dish.
13. Bake for another 15 minutes.

Et voila! Lazy but tasty (and extraordinarily filling) tortilla casserole. We all really enjoyed it-- even the Emperor, who generally will not eat anything where the ingredients are mixed together like this but made an exception for a dish that contained tofu, polenta, tortillas, AND tortilla chips-- and have a ton leftover to put in the freezer for baby time. My only regret is the sauce... I wish I'd bought enough enchilada sauce to use that entirely instead of having to cut it with the spaghetti sauce, which was fine but reduced the flavor overall.

The Emperor did still ask for snack before bed (a demand we almost never acquiesce to; my general feeling is that he should eat enough at dinner to not be hungry again before bed) and since he had eaten a legit amount of dinner, he did get a cookie. Here he is enjoying it:

Baked pancakes, a bit of a flop (Still Baking #3)

2012-01-03T19:50:00.000-08:00

On the upside: today was my last day of work! I am on leave now! WOOOOOO!

On the downside: today I also had to take down the Christmas tree so that the city could recycle it. (They mulch the trees and use the mulch in playgrounds throughout the county. That's pretty sweet, you have to admit.) That made me really sad and totally threw my mood off...

And so I was in a haphazard mood when I entered the kitchen, and not paying a lot of attention to what I was doing...

Which is probably why I ended up with these:

Baked pancakes. They tasted better than they looked, which was almost a necessity considering just how bad they looked when they came out of the oven. They were a little on the too whole wheaty side (I'm out of white whole wheat flour and only have straight up gritty whole wheat flour) but once I spritzed them with lemon juice and sprinkled on some demerara sugar, they were passable. The Emperor really liked them-- he's always happy to have pancakes for dinner-- so I guess they weren't really a failure, they just felt that way.

Well, I did agree to embrace my failures in 2012, so I guess I may as well start Jan 3rd!

Last but not least, here's your daily Emperor. I think there's something adorable about him brushing his teeth. It may be a mom thing.

Gluten-free chocolate-cranberry energy bars (Still Baking #2)

2012-01-02T19:42:00.000-08:00

Hey! You know what I haven't posted in a while? A recipe for something! I'm going to change that today with an easy energy bar recipe. This is based on a recipe in Sarah Matheny's Peas and Thank You. I de-glutenized it and added a few tweaks of my own, but if you like it, I recommend checking out her book... which has another super yummy (and already GF) energy bar recipe I keep meaning to try.

Here's my version, in any case:

GF Chocolate-cranberry energy bars
makes 12 smallish bars

3 tbsp ground flax seed
6 tbsps water

2c oats
1/4c almond meal
3 tbsps soy flour
3 tbsps quinoa flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4c sugar
1/4c chocolate chips
1/2c dried cranberries

6 tbsps peanut butter
2 tbsps tahini
1/4c agave nectar

1. Preheat oven to 375 and line a 9x9 baking dish with parchment paper. (Or spray if you want to. I like parchment paper because I am so lazy.)
2. Mix together flax and water in a small bowl and set aside to get good and gooey.
3. Put all the dry ingredients (oats, almond meal, soy flour, quinoa flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, chocolate chips, cranberries) in a large bowl and stir well to combine.
4. Dump flax-water mixture, peanut butter, tahini, and agave in on top of dry ingredients and mix vigorously.
5. Spread out the mixture (which will be ugly as sin) in your baking dish.
6. Bake for 15 minutes, then allow to cool for at least another 15 before digging in.

And that's it! You know how I am always hating on quinoa flour and how it tastes so quinoa-y. You actually can't taste it in this recipe. Must be hidden under all the other deliciousness.

I do think these came out a touch too sweet. I had already decreased the sweetener slightly from the P&TY recipe but would go further next time-- maybe cut out the dry sugar entirely and see how they hold up with just the agave. The cranberries and the chocolate chips make these sweet enough already.

We used up the end of the peanut butter making these, and the Emperor asked if he could have a taste of the PB so I just gave him the jar and a spoon, figuring he'd give up pretty soon after realizing there wasn't much left to scoop up. But he really went to town making sure he got every bit of peanut butter he could get out of that jar... here he is fishing for more:

Obviously peanut butter is very serious business.

Whole wheat bread (Still Baking #1)

2012-01-01T20:01:00.001-08:00

A new year! A new month! A new BLOG THEME! I'm excited, are you?

As I may have mentioned (because it's the most exciting thing going on in my life right now), I am going on leave from work on Wednesday! Since I have tomorrow off anyway, I'm functionally on leave now. WOO!

Since I will have free time, and since I need a theme for my blog that is supposedly food themed, I am going to bake something every day between now and baby having. Get it? The baby is still baking and so am I.

I'm going to try to make some healthier baked things but I also have a couple of people who I wanted to send Christmas goodies to but didn't quite make it on, so there will probably be some of that in there too. And I'd like to play around with deglutenizing some more stuff because, well, I've got the free time and I still have all this xanthan gum, ha ha. So yeah: baking stuff. That's this month's theme.

Today I made these lovely loaves of bread. They're just generic whole wheat, nothing too interesting at all. Every time I don't make bread for a while, I forget how easy and satisfying it is. I got Peter Reinholt's The Bread Baker's Apprentice for my birthday last year and it changed my bread baking life. So many simple tips for making bread that make even the most basic loaf like four times as good. It's not vegan (maybe half the recipes are by default) but I've had great success veganizing things out of it. Highly recommended.

Um, anyway... yeah. These loaves turned out well, I think. Saving them for breakfast tomorrow morning.

Several times today, the Emperor wedged himself into the empty half of a case of Trader Joe's fizzy waters that we have sitting next to the oven in the kitchen. Apparently it's exactly the right size for him to sit in, and he thinks it is hilarious. He's weird, but here he is:

Flower juice, silly hats (Celebration #31)

2011-12-31T19:22:00.000-08:00

Happy new year internet!

I have no idea what the new year will bring for me with respect to blogging. A theme for January is forming in my mind, but we'll see how it pans out. The past few months have been a ton of fun though and I really appreciate everyone who's read and commented and made me feel like it's sort of awesome that I"m such a big dork, if you know what I mean.

Simple celebration for us tonight. No WAY are we keeping the Emperor up until midnight, not to mention that would be torture for me too. I sleep so badly right now that I have to hoard every moment of sleep I can get. Anyway, the Emperor and I made and decorated some crowns earlier in the day, and then after dinner we enjoyed glasses of flower juice-- sparkling apple cider with hibiscus flowers in syrup in it. Josh's idea. Greatly enjoyed by all. The Emperor thought toasting was the best thing ever so we probably said cheers about a hundred times.

The flower juice.

My party hat. His was very minimal... he did NOT want anything glued to it today. But as the evening wore on, he came to regret the lack of glitter on his own crown and took mine instead. Oh well.

Finally, our last daily Emperor for 2011! Here he is wearing my bike gear earlier. Those gloves are too big for me, so they're outlandish on him. I love it.

Thank you notes & cranberry oat bars (Celebrations #29 and #30)

2011-12-30T19:04:00.000-08:00

I had today off, and spent it getting a bunch of stuff crossed off on my pre-baby checklist and just hangin' out with the Emperor. Oh, and we started an attempt to do 3-day potty training. Due to that last item, we spent the whole day in the kitchen (easiest floors to clean; sorry non-kid people, I know that's gross, so just pretend I'm saying it about a dog or something) and while keeping him entertained in there all day was a bit arduous, it meant we more or less did nothing but things that he thinks are really fun.

And that is how we ended up having not one but TWO seasonal celebrations today!

Here's the total list of things we did: made pizza dough, drove cars and trucks on the floor for seriously an hour straight, assembled a train track (but then did not drive the train on it), told stories about what the guys in the cars and trucks were doing, read about six thousand books including four readings of One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, wrote out thank you cards for Christmas presents & colored/decorated them, made cranberry oat bars out of half of the cranberry chutney/sauce we have leftover from Christmas dinner, took a bubble bath... that plus meals and nap time pretty much covered our day. Phew.

The Emperor really wanted to get out the art supplies but didn't actually end up doing that much decorating on the thank you cards. I think I'm going to offer them to him again tomorrow and see if he wants to do more. Picture pending after that...

The cranberry oat bars are wonderful, and a highly recommended use of leftover cranberry sauce. I used the recipe for raspberry oat bars from The Joy of Vegan Baking (here is the recipe as a PDF... not sure why this is floating around on pbs.org but there you go) and just subbed in our cranberries for the jam, but I expect you could use any sort of fruit/oat bar recipe and do the same. I did have to use a bit more than the recipe called for to get the entire surface area of the oat bars covered-- perhaps because the chutney is thicker than jam would be. Freakin' delicious, though, and actually not terribly unhealthy when made with whole grain flour. (Which is good. I think all of our digestive systems need a break after the past week or two.)

Here's one up close and personal:

And here's your daily Emperor too. I know I have a lot of variants on this picture (him reading with Josh) but it's just one of my favorite images to capture... this is a new book from Christmas (Little Hoot) and it is great, wonderful art and a funny story to boot.

New Year Stars (Celebration #28)

2011-12-29T18:01:00.001-08:00

Two points of business, people:

1. Today is my youngest brother's birthday. He doesn't read this blog, but that's okay: happy birthday anyway Mikey!

2. Today is also my second to last day of work before leave. I have to go back on January 3rd, but that's it. And I think I'm going to go in late and leave early on the 3rd so... this was basically my last real day. Is that not exciting? I am excited.

Both good things! While I am still feeling pretty mopey (Pingpong, life), I think both of these things merit some sort of celebratory action. Also, the Emperor told me flat out earlier today: "We need to DO a CRAFT, Mommy." Very pointedly. I think he thinks I've been slacking.

So we spent about an hour this evening crafting some little New Year Stars. I can't think of anything else that seems appropriate symbolism-wise for New Year's except champagne bottles and well, that would be a weird craft to make with a two year old. Stars are definitely more to his speed.

Here are my stars, hung up on our holiday door. (The lovely card above is from Amey!) I just drew them out on cardboard, cut them out, wrapped the stars in tin foil, and stuck a couple of sequins on them. This seriously took me an hour because I had a lot of trouble cutting out the star shapes.

The Emperor's star. I *had* covered his in foil for him per his request, but then he decided to take the foil off. His isn't on the door yet because the glue's still drying. (He used a lot of glue.) In the time that it took me to make 3 little stars, he colored this star and covered another huge piece of scrap cardboard with marker scribblings, and he shredded a big piece of tin foil into tiny tiny bits. He works fast!

We had a really fun time and I'm glad I sucked it up and did something enjoyable with him.

Speaking of which, here's a picture I took while we were at the park earlier:

Doesn't he look just super serious? Nice trick, kid.

Yearly Self-Review in Form of Internet Survey (Celebration #27)

2011-12-28T19:13:00.000-08:00

Well, the celebration season is winding down around here. I have to tell you, I'm feeling a bit glum about the series of holidays (Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas) coming to an end this year. Usually I'm a bit relieved when they're over, and I guess I am this year too, but at the same time, I just feel like... boy. Such a long stretch of time now before we have anything big and fun to look forward to.

Of course, our baby's due in two weeks, so something interesting will probably happen in the next 0-4 weeks, but that's not really the same. I mean, what kind of decorations do you make for pending offspring?! I need inspiration to glue something onto something else people!

Anyway, anyway. I've been trying to think up a few fun New Year's celebrations to do this week but my heart hasn't been in it. So tonight I did something I do every year: fill out this internet survey someone posted on livejournal back in like 2006-2007. Every year I fill it out again, and then every now and again I go back and re-read my own answers. I'm not going to post my answers here because it's a personal thing for me... but I'll post a link to the survey in case you want to have a moment of self-reflection too.

Yearly survey

PS: Emperor photograph pending-- I got a good one today but my iphone is in the other room and seriously, I'm too weary to get up and get it right now. :P

ETA: Here he is, carefully considering a butter knife:

Singing Christmas songs (Celebration #26)

2011-12-27T19:34:00.001-08:00

Thank you for all the kind thoughts regarding Pingpong yesterday. It really means a lot to me.

Today we had a busy day-- the Emperor doesn't have preschool this week, but Josh and I still have work, so we're sort of swapping off watching him during the day. Getting up at 4:30 - biking to work - working a full day - biking downtown - THEN picking up the Emperor and taking him with me to a doctor's appointment and walking home with him (literally carrying him for about a mile)... phew. Tiring.

So we had a very mellow celebration today. We just sang some of our favorite Christmas songs together. Jingle Bells, Rudolph, Frosty the Snowman, We Wish You a Merry Christmas... all his favorites.

Here he is singing a little of Jingle Bells at the doctor's office:

No celebration today...

2011-12-26T19:43:00.000-08:00

My dear sweet old guinea pig Pingpong died sometime between last night and this morning. My heart's too heavy to celebrate much of anything today.

He was a wonderful guinea pig and we'll miss him terribly. I don't want to type it all over, but you can read a little about him and his passing in this PPK thread and see some cute pictures.

Goodbye Pingpong.

Best Christmas ever (Celebration #25)

2011-12-25T19:56:00.001-08:00

Started with this:

Ended with this:

With so much wonderful in between. Maybe I'll expand on our day tomorrow but for now, I am celebrating by going to bed early! Happy holidays, internet!

Cookies for Santa, and more (Celebration #24)

2011-12-24T20:41:00.001-08:00

Oh my goodness! Christmas is tomorrow! How did that even happen? This month really just flew around here.

Today was a pretty epic day of tying up loose ends/prepping for Christmas. I don't know how we could possibly have had so much stuff left to do, but we did. Well, there were chores to be done (can anyone celebrate if their house is dirty? if the carpet crunches when you walk across it, that's not so festive!) mostly, some food stuff for tomorrow to be prepped (we are going to have a nice dinner even though it will just be the 3 of us, AND a special treat for breakfast... then we're all gonna fast til Easter), presents to be wrapped (most were already done), stockings to be hung, cookies to be baked for Santa, guinea pig house to be cleaned, etc.

Oh, and we took breaks in there to go for coffee date (Emperor and me) and to watch the Black Adder Christmas special (all three of us.)

Phew.

Our specific celebratory activity was making gingerbread cookies to leave out for Santa. And to eat ourselves. The Emperor may be a little kid but he's sharp enough to know that one should always save a couple of cookies to enjoy oneself, ahem.

We used the gingerbread cut-out cookies recipe from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. They're good, but as you can see, they turned out very pasty for gingerbread. They're just not as molasses-y as some gingerbread, and I missed that in both the flavor and the color. They were very easy to roll out though, so maybe that's the tradeoff.

Here are the ones we left out for Santa:

Well, there were a couple more initially, but you know how it goes...

Remember our Christmas Door? It's pretty much full now! The stockings are a sham, though-- I didn't get around to stitching the other halves on after the felt-glue debacle. That's okay, they're pretty anyhow.

For Christmas, our ancient gentleman guinea pig Pingpong got a bath. And I got guinea pig snuggles. He has become so peaceful and huggy in his old age... sweet enough for me to overcome the wet guinea pig smell. (Which is worse BY FAR than wet dog could ever be.) I cuddled him and fed him orange slices and we had a grand old time.

Last but not least, here's your Emperor picture! This was after he cut out his first two gingerbread men. He was saying "Can I EAT them?" while I took this picture:

Merry Christmas! I hope that wherever you are and whatever you're doing tomorrow, you get some of the ideal parts of the holidays: some sweet time with family and/or friends, a nice present, something good to eat, something like that. And may you have very little of the tedious stuff (family drama, cranky people at the grocery store, stuff like that).

The Christmas Toy & How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Celebration #23)

2011-12-23T20:33:00.000-08:00

Today was a bit of a wash. It was nice to have the day off from work, but the rest of the day was not particularly wonderful. Josh woke up feeling pretty rough... as if we haven't had someone ill in the family for long enough!!... so we couldn't go visit our friends who have a new baby. Very sad for both the Emperor and me, but you just don't take risks with colds and other people's babies.

Then we were going to visit our old landlords-- but they weren't home. So that was our other big thing of the day that didn't up happening. Doh.

We DID get to go to the park twice though (once to the park next to our house, and once at a nice park up near where we used to live) and both times, the Emperor ran into some little boys about his age. Very fun for him. Not as much fun for me, but, that's life as a grownup sometimes.

Despite not getting to do what we set out to do, we spent a lot of the day out and about so when we got home, we wanted a low-energy celebration. We first set out to watch The Christmas Toy, another Jim Henson Christmas special. If you're familiar with the plot of Toy Story, this is very similar to that, just a few decades older. Basically, there's a toy who was last year's big Christmas present, and he's about to get replaced by this year's present, and it's hard for him to make the mental adjustment.

I thought it was actually pretty cute and sweet. I like the premise in Toy Story but it's kind of um, hm, how do I put this... I feel like some of the social stuff in it is just a little too mean for really little kid. That problem doesn't surface in The Christmas Toy. (Your tradeoff is that it's not particularly funny or anything, unlike TS.)

After that, dinner still wasn't ready (more on that in a sec) so we went ahead and rewatched How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The Emperor and I watched it together at the tail end of November, but I asked him if he'd like to see it again and he answered with great enthusiasm, so we did it. I think he liked it even more this time. (Possibly because he's just more familiar with Christmas imagery now.) Ah, such a great movie. One of the few things where I actually think it's better than the book (which is great too). Excellent.

Dinner was delicious-- Josh made tofu buffalo wings in the style of the Don't Eat Off the Sidewalk tempeh wingz and some vegan bleu cheese dressing, and then we ate this big sloppy mess wrapped up in tortillas. Very reminiscent of a place we used to eat in Worcester. Mmmm. Junk food. So good.

The Emperor was not in to dinner at all, because we ate way too late and he was just exhausted and crabby. Oops. Sometimes it can be hard (for both him and for me) to remember how good of a day he's had when he has such a sour mood at the end. But here's a picture to remind us all:

Looking at lights! (Celebration #22)

2011-12-22T19:36:00.000-08:00

Tonight we did something I've been looking forward to for a while: the Emperor and I went out for a walk and looked at the lights/decorations on our street! It was cold and dark and my feet hurt like they always do now, but it was worth it for the look on his face and his general enthusiasm about the event. And I loved seeing the lights too.

Not much else to say today! Just pictures!

Decorations across the street from us. Frosty 'Noman AND Santa! He loved these.

Animatronic reindeer... these were by far his favorite decoration. We probably spent about 10 minutes (divided over two visits, one on the way out and one on the way back) just gazing at these. He was just so delighted: "Reindeer! The reindeer are EATING GRASS mommy!" Love it. They made a great mechanical squeaky noise when they moved too.

Peering in at the reindeer.

Looking at some lights.

And even more.

I had coffee date with my friend Amey this afternoon and mentioned that my blog mostly hasn't been about food this month. The honest truth of the matter is that I just have no enthusiasm for cooking or really eating right now... same thing happened at the end of my last pregnancy. Weird, huh? But you can rest assured that eventually... this blog will be more food, less random photos of the Emperor doing things.

Just not any time SOON, people!

Okay, last picture of my kid for today. Smooch:

Snowflakes! (Celebration #21)

2011-12-21T19:25:00.000-08:00

Happy solstice guys! Hey, it's officially winter now!

In keeping with our official change of season, tonight we hung up snowflakes on our living room windows.

Almost no one is at my work right now-- many people seem to be using vacation days to stay out until January 3rd. (We have four, count them, four paid holidays between then and now so it's not really that many days that people are spending.) No people in the office = no work for me = verrrrrrry very boring days. So it was critical that I find something to occupy my afternoon today. I think the Emperor is a little young to cut out snowflakes himself (he can't use scissors yet!) but figured he'd like helping hang them on the windows.

I printed out a few designs from the internet, then cut the flakes out of old printer test pages. You would not believe how many printer test pages I regularly have stacked on my desk... I make little work notebooks out of them, use them for notes, etc, but boy do they pile up quickly. Nice to have yet another use for them.

The Emperor did like hanging them at first. I think he hung three total (out of maybe 30?). He got really frustrated because he kept trying to stick the side without the tape donut on the window, and he didn't want me to show him how to do it and he wasn't listening to verbal directions. He was actually pretty crabby tonight... we think he skipped his nap at preschool because he was just exhausted and grumpy when he got home. Oh well. He is snugly tucked into bed and the windows got decorated anyway, so it all works out.

Here he is looking deceptively charming during his tooth brushing session:

The Bells of Fraggle Rock (Celebration #20)

2011-12-20T20:14:00.000-08:00

Today was a busy day of dashing about and biking hither and yon. I had a doctor's appointment after work, which meant I biked about half an hour more than I do most week days. Used to be this wouldn't bother me, but my body is really feeling it today. Owwww.

We went out to dinner for the first time in some time at Dharma's in Capitola. I was worried the Emperor would be kind of jerky, it being somewhat late for dinner for him, but he was quite well behaved. We ordered him a big pile of baked tofu (his request) and got some tapioca pudding (a favorite of his) to share... and hilariously... he had two bites of tapioca, pushed it away, and asked for more tofu. Sometimes I just don't know what to make of him.

Anyway, after dinner, we came home and had a very small celebration. We watched the Fraggle Rock Christmas Special, "The Bells of Fraggle Rock." Kind of a heavy handed metaphor for how Christmas is in your heart etc, but we enjoyed it. (It helps that it's only 24 minutes long, and thus does not overstay its welcome.) Would be better with more songs, like all things Fraggle. (And most things Christmas.)

Then we watched a couple of Christmas song videos on YouTube, and then the Emperor demanded his monkey pajamas, and then he brushed his teeth and laid down in bed and sang me "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and then had me sing him Rudolph and Jingle Bells and Baa Baa Black Sheep (a song for all seasons). We may be very lazy but we're still feeling preeeeeetty festive around here.

Okay, I'm about to fall over, so I'll leave you with this picture of the Emperor at Dharma's:

Stockings! (Celebration #19)

2011-12-19T19:55:00.000-08:00

You know what is surprisingly difficult guys? Gluing things to felt! What! Don't you have memories of doing this like all the time as a little kid? I do. But I think they must be flawed because I couldn't get half of anything to stick to our felt today. Well, as you will see, we did eventually get SOME sequins to stick to them. But sheesh!

My big problem came in gluing the halves of our felt stockings together. It just did not work. I'm going to have to stitch them by hand I think... okay, well, whatever.

The Emperor had a blast with this craft, I think because he got to boss me extensively. He pulled sequins out, instructed me which ones needed glue, whose stocking they were to go on, and where. You'll notice that he only thought his stocking and Josh's needed "glitter" (his word):

Mine needed "letters" but no glitter. Okay, fair enough...

I'm curious to see how well the sequins do or don't stick once the glue dries. I hope at least some of them will stay on... he really wanted to hang up his stocking tonight with the rest of our holiday crafts but I convinced him to wait til tomorrow when things are dry.

The Emperor had a rough night last night... he fell asleep early but then woke up an hour or two later after a nightmare (we think) and a coughing fit. Poor little guy. He was inconsolable for about half an hour, and then restless the rest of the night. He was obviously suuuuuuper tired tonight and after dinner and our craft, he heard some bedtime stories and then basically passed out. Here he is about to hear his second story:

Wrapping presents (Celebration #18)

2011-12-18T19:37:00.000-08:00

Can I tell you what is honestly one of my favorite parts of the Christmas season? Not just giving people presents (which everyone likes, including me!), but wrapping presents. And that's exactly what I did for my celebration today: got some wrapping paper and wrapped some stuff up!

I often helped my mom wrap presents for my younger siblings when I was a kid. I understood very early on that it was important to prioritize financially and get stuff for the littler kids for whom Christmas was still a magical present oriented holiday. That sounds like it ought to be sad or something, but wrapping presents for my siblings form some of the sweetest memories I have from childhood. There is such a joy in sharing what you do have, even if what you have isn't a lot.

Annnnyway, I am super excited about this being the first Christmas season where the Emperor really understands presents. (We are not planning on telling him that things came from Santa, by the way. Think we've settled on explaining Santa as a kind of cosmic postal worker-- the presents are from grandma and grandpa or whoever, but Santa brought them to the house.) Trying not to go nuts getting him things, and I think we're doing a good job so far. The presents in that first picture ARE all for him, but it's worth noting that four out of the five packages in there are um, socks and underwear.

I also packed up a package for my PPK swap partner, which made me really happy. I think she's going to like it! I hope she's going to like it! It was fun to put together. Her package came the other day and it's crazy, people... I want to post about it but haven't had the time to sit quietly and do it yet. Sneak preview: alder smoked salt and some crazy confection with pretzels and vegan marshmallows suspended in chocolate! OMG.

Okay, gotta cut this short, because I'm exhausted. You know who else was exhausted tonight? The Emperor. He didn't really nap today and he was just dragging by the time evening came around. Somewhere between 6:30 and 7, I noticed that his breathing was getting verrrrry noisy and sounding a little snore-y. Looked over and his eyes were about 90% closed. Josh asked him if he was sleepy and he mumbled "yeah" and just sort of slumped over, out cold. D'awww. Too cute. This doesn't happen much anymore but it's sweet when it does.

Don't believe me? Look how sweet:

Molly's Solstice Party (Celebration #17)

2011-12-17T20:27:00.000-08:00

Isn't it funny that sometimes the things that are the most fun are the least interesting to blog about? For our celebration today, we went to our friend Molly's annual Solstice party. Most years we miss it because we're traveling to or from Oregon, but since we're home this year, we actually got to go. We don't get to see as much of Molly as we'd like to-- she lives up by San Francisco which is quite a long drive from here-- so it's always a treat.

Speaking of treats, I made oatmeal cookies with dried cranberries and chocolate chips to take the party. There were also these wonderful vegan gingersnaps that the hosts made for us:

This party was kind of nuts, I think at the peak there were something like six people under the age of 3 there. Needless to say, the Emperor had a really freakin' good time. I had a good time too but it seems to have provoked quite a headache in me, so I am going to wrap this up promptly and get into bed.

He really WAS having a good time though you can't tell it from the pictures I took of him at the party, which all involved this red watering can:

He really needs his bangs cut.

A work Christmas party (Celebration #16)

2011-12-16T20:23:00.000-08:00

Oh man! December is half over!

Today's celebration was just not the most exciting thing ever. My workplace had its Christmas party, which consisted of a potluck and a white elephant swap. As any vegan who works with mostly non-vegans can tell you, work potlucks tend to be pretty sad affairs. I generally try to keep a good attitude about this sort of thing and make sure to bring stuff I like and not feel sorry for myself when no one else brings anything I can eat.

It was a little hard to keep my good attitude today, though, when the potluck tables were set up seriously 2 feet away from my cubicle entrance, and someone plopped a huge cooked ham down on it. For the next half hour before the potluck actually started, people drifted by commenting on how lovely the ham smelled/looked/whatevered and saying things to me like "you have the best spot! look at all this food that is here for you!" Oy vey. It was a little bit trying, to tell you the truth. I was so glad that a) we were actually eating in the conference room, and b) that the party was late enough in the day that I could leave right after and not have to wallow in my ham-reeking cubicle.

But!!!! As non-fun as the potluck part was, the white elephant swap was extremely entertaining. I ended up getting a napkin holder (?) with gingerbread men on it. The Emperor is going to be thrilled. He LOVES gingerbread men.

And I did get a full plate of lunch, even though I provided 75% of it-- hummus, bread, olives, chocolate peppermint biscotti (all me), grapes, grapefruit, and some really fantastic homemade mustard which I put on the bread. Can't complain about that.

The Emperor hasn't been feeling great... well, just at night. We think he may have croup, because he's fine in the day but all night long he is a coughing mess. He and I were up for probably close to 2 hours over the course of last night because of his coughing, which was upsetting for us both... and we're both a little crispy crunchy today... so we had a nice low key night after preschool. No additional celebration for him tonight. (Well, we did sing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and "Jingle Bells" 3 times before bed.) He had a little cup of decaf chai and some snuggles and then I sent him to bed, like so:

That's his own little bed, with my childhood blanket. (No, I don't know why he chews on it, he just does.)

A Christmas treeeeeeeeee! (Celebration #15)

2011-12-15T20:40:00.000-08:00

GUYS! We got our Christmas tree today!

We didn't get THAT one, though it was hard to resist when the Emperor was standing next to trees basically the same exact size as himself. He had a ridiculously large amount of fun running around the Christmas tree lot, examining trees, crawling through hay bales, petting the dog who belongs to the Christmas tree guy, and shouting random things about Christmas. ("Frosty 'noman! CANNY CANES! KISSMAS TREEEEEEEEEES!) It was worth waiting for him to get home from preschool to get the tree and braving the traffic to get to the tree lot...

Speaking of which, we bought our Christmas tree from Christmas Trees for Recovery, a non-profit thing run by a community service organization that does outreach for low income people and more specifically to addicts & their families. One can argue the merits of a real tree vs a plastic tree, but I think it's nice to have the option to give my money to a local organization that seems to actually improve our community.

We did some decoration tonight-- lights and our flour/salt ornaments. I don't think it's "done" yet but it's a start, and actually it looks pretty good.

Just the lights...

Ornament closeup...

I don't seem to have gotten a picture yet of the tree with the ornaments and lights on. Oh well, there's still time.

Speaking of ornaments, the Emperor was CRAZY about putting them on. Really just thrilled by it. He had so much fun. It totally reminded me why I was so gung ho about getting a Christmas tree this year.

Dinner was really a non-event due to the fact that I've had terrible heartburn for oh, about 24 hours now... it's not responding to medication at all (huge doses of zantac followed by some prilosec on the advice of my OB) and so food is about the least appealing thing. Forget dinner. Go back and look at our tree again. Treeeee!

Finally, here's a nice picture of the Emperor at the tree lot:

Cara's Nog Cookies! (Celebration #14)

2011-12-14T20:20:00.001-08:00

For today's celebration, I baked up a huge batch of gluten-free eggnog cookies based on the recipe that featured in Fork and Beans 12 days of Cookiemas. Since I didn't have the pre-mixed baking mix that she recommends, I ended up having to play around with the recipe quite a bit, but I'm really happy with the end result so I'm posting it here!

Cara's Nog Cookies
makes about 5 dozen

Gluten-free flour mix (based on one I saw on the PPK earlier):
1 1/2 c white rice flour
1/2 c coconut flour
1/2 c almond meal
1 c GF oat flour
3/4 c tapioca flour
2 tsps xanthan gum
1 tsp baking powder

3/4 c Earth Balance
1/4 c coconut oil
2 c sugar
1 c non-dairy nog (I used Silk's soy nog)
1 tsp nutmeg, or to taste
1/2 tsp cardamom

For rolling:
powdered sugar
more nutmeg
more cardamom

1. Preheat oven to 350F and line a couple of baking sheets with parchment paper.
2. Mix together all of the flour mix ingredients and set aside.
3. Cream together Earth Balance, coconut oil, and sugar, adding a little of the nog if it does not seem to be creaming on its own.
4. Beat in the nog.
5. Mix in the nutmeg & cardamom; taste to make sure your cookies taste noggy enough.
6. When liquid ingredients are spiced to your liking, dump flour in and mix til just combined.
7. Fill wide shallow dish with powdered sugar & some more spices.
8. Drop cookies by the spoonful into powdered sugar, then use your fingertips to gently roll them into balls.
9. Place balls on prepared cookie sheets and press gently in the center of each one with your thumb to flatten slightly.
10. Bake at 350F for 16 minutes, then allow to cool on cookie sheets for at least 10 minutes before moving to wire cooling racks.

I have no idea what's in the Authentic Foods GF baking mix, but I think it must be very different than mine... I had to bake hotter AND longer to get these to a point where they'd ever be cooked all the way through. My first batch came out really bizarrely squidgy (fortunately it was only the first dozen... out of five) and I played from there til I got it right for this particular mix of flours. Oh gluten free baking! You are an exciting new adventure!

Flavorwise, I love these. They're really good. Super noggy and yummers. I am SO GLAD I didn't use quinoa flour because yeah, they don't have that quinoa flour bitterness that I hate so much.

The Emperor was not a super great helper with these (he mixed a little, but actually told me it was my turn to mix again... not something he usually ever does) but once they were baked, really, really, really loved these. He ate four... of the squidgy first batch. He probably would have begged for more but then it was bedtime.

Here he is idly mixing. You can see that his heart wasn't in it today! I wish I had gotten a picture of him enjoying the cookies instead but there you go...

Gingerbread man cut-outs and simple spaghetti (Celebration #13)

2011-12-13T19:05:00.000-08:00

Let us agree not to talk about the majority of today. My week: it's not going great.

But we did get a good celebration in today. The Emperor and I decorated some paper cut-outs of gingerbread men! He loves gingerbread men almost as much as he loves Frosty 'noman.

He was very delighted with the one that I made and has been telling me since I finished it that it's his. Which is not factually speaking true, which I've told him, but you know, he's two so sometimes you have to cut him a little slack on the truth front. It's not his fault that I've already been to preschool and he's still working his way through it... developing his skills at gluing things to other things... he'll get there eventually. Here's his guy:

Actually, I really like his. It's got a sort of um... terrified look on its face? It's good!

I finally hung up the crafts we've already made a couple of days ago, so as soon as we were done the gingerbread men, I added them to the Christmas wall. (Actually, it's a door, but that's neither here nor there.) Starting to look pretty fun, at least according to the Emperor and me.

Christmas cards are going on the door too, along the edge-- you can just barely see one of our first two on the top left corner of the picture. (Hmm. Only two Christmas cards on Dec 13th? I think this is going to be a slow year...)

Simple dinner tonight: whole wheat spaghetti with broccoli and Trader Joe's chicken-less strips with lemon juice and garlic. Josh and I had a bit of olive oil & salt and pepper on our noodles; the Emperor had his plain (of course). He ate a huge bowl of broccoli while waiting for the rest of the stuff to cook, then ate noodles and chik'n strips. Success!

Is it just me or are there a lot more types of noodles at the average grocery store than there used to be? Sometimes I am just in the mood for a big bowl of plain-ish noodles and it seems like my options are a lot greater than they were even five or six years ago... I love that I can find brown rice noodles (my favorite!) basically anywhere I go now. Maybe it's a California thing though.

Here's the Emperor loving his noodles:

A simple glass of soy nog (Celebration #12)

2011-12-12T19:47:00.001-08:00

Hey, remember last month when I locked myself out of the house and had to walk downtown and was like "this sucks"? Guess what? I did exactly the same thing today. And it sucked-- I was already feeling physically worn down and pained and adding another half hour walk on top of everything else I did today was just uncalled for. My uterus is mad at me, my back is mad at me, my body is overall like "you have had a series of bad ideas, you know that?"

So anyway, VERY low key celebration today and very brief post because I'm just going to post this and then lie down (at 8 p.m.).

For our celebration tonight, we... had some glasses of warm soy nog. Yup.

A little nog for everyone. The Emperor actually only had two sips (of mine) and not the little cup I poured for him. I cut some Silk soy nog with unsweetened soy milk, heated it on the stove, and added some extra freshly grated nutmeg on top. Definitely a nice treat. It didn't relax me as much I was hoping but hey, take what you can get...

We had hummus and stuff for dinner which was not very exciting. The Emperor was in a very silly mood which was more exciting. He kept going back and forth about whether or not he wanted to eat a carrot. I think this is the closest he got to actually ingesting anything:

Flour-Salt Ornaments & Chickpea soup with rice (Celebration #11)

2011-12-11T20:12:00.001-08:00

A sad truth about me is that I am not very emotionally flexible. Or mentally flexible? Um... I have a hard time with change, is what I'm saying. Any change. Even good change. I hate hate hate when plans change. Like even if they change to something better. Once I seriously burst into tears because we had been planning to stay at home and do nothing all day (pre-Emperor, when this really meant doing... nothing) and Josh was like "hey let's go to the beach and look at tiny lobsters in tide pools." That is a far superior plan but things changed and I have trouble with that!

(I think the Emperor has made me a lot better about this, though; when one's schedule is primarily dictated by a small human tyrant/madman, one becomes used to letting plans go.)

What I'm getting around to is: we were supposed to get our Christmas tree this weekend. But, fates conspired, stars aligned (misaligned?), I got paid half a paycheck, etc, and the tree just necessarily needed to wait until later in the week. It's not really a big deal to wait 4-5 more days for a Christmas tree (esp. after SEVEN YEARS of no tree!) but I was having a little meltdown about it on Friday until I realized... OH MAN!!! this is actually a GOOD thing because I don't have ornaments yet! And what is sadder than a naked Christmas tree?

So we made flour-salt ornaments this afternoon to guarantee that our tree will not be sad and bare. I looooove making flour-salt ornaments but again, it's something I haven't done in forever. (Since high school, when I made a couple more every year.) And so the Emperor and I sat down and cranked some out this afternoon. He had a great time and stayed occupied for almost an hour... pretty close to a record for anything holding his attention, heh.

He only actually produced one ornament-- he kept making interesting shapes that I tried to take from him and put on the cookie sheet, but he didn't want me to have them. He would make something cool and then look at it for a minute and then squish it back into a ball of dough. Oh well, whatever, he had fun!

We used this recipe for the dough and it worked quite nicely:

Flour-salt ornament dough

2c flour (I used a mix of AP and bread flour, because I only had about half that of plain AP)
1c salt
1c warm water
1 tbsp cardamom (for a slight amount of color & scent!)

Mix it all together, shape, bake at 250F for 1.5 hrs.

We got one pretty full cookie sheet worth of ornaments out of that much dough. I'm thinking these plus some plain colored bulbs and lights will probably be enough to cover our (intended to be smallish, but we'll see what we end up with) tree.

For dinner we had chickpea soup with black rice. Basically, I halved the recipe for the Arabian Lentil-Rice Soup from Appetite for Reduction, used black rice rather than brown, and put chickpeas in instead of lentils. Delicious! And a half recipe was perfect for us. Josh & I had seconds and the Emperor had um, one bite? And aside from the three bites he didn't eat (I don't serve him much of anything to start with), nothing went to waste.

Here he is while making ornaments. I think you can tell he's having fun:

Potato stamp Christmas cards & burritos (Celebration #10)

2011-12-10T18:42:00.000-08:00

So I've been trying to balance our celebrations between things that are just laid back and fun (watching movies, making a couple of decorations for inside our house) and ones that are semi-productive (baking, candy making). Today was somewhere sort of in between. We made potato stamps! And stamped Christmas cards with them!

Here are some of the stamps:

And our scrap paper/table covering paper:

Potato stamping is so fun and easy and cool looking once it's done. I can't believe I haven't done it since... middle school? Ish? Definitely going to do it again sooner. The couple of cards I got made look pretty okay too, in a "I made these while a 2 year old 'helped' me" kind of way, heh.

The Emperor actually didn't love this craft-- he thought the potatoes were amazing but he wanted to stamp each potato more or less exactly once and after he'd stamped each one he would demand another. He was annoyed when we ran out of potato designs that he hadn't tried yet. (We had 9 altogether: letters M, E, R, Y, a star, a Christmas tree, a present, an ornament, a candy cane. Not enough to keep him entertained apparently.) Well, bully to him, I liked it.

Speaking of things I like: burritos! Which is what Josh made me for dinner tonight! Behold:

You can't tell how good they are from looking at them. They were kinda spicy, kinda sweet, very yummy. Would eat again.

The Emperor only really wanted to eat tortillas... I think the insides were too saucy for his liking. He helped make them, though, and did have fun with that. Part of the way through dinner, he folded his tortilla up into quarters and stuck it on his face. I asked him what he was doing and he told me: "I got a bump on my face. I'm putting icepack on." Ha ha, what? Okay guy. Whatever. Here he is with his wheat-based icepack:

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer & Popcorn Night (Celebration #9)

2011-12-09T19:06:00.000-08:00

Brief post today! I'm okay, not even too too tired, feeling physically better than I have in like two weeks. I just thought about all the stuff we could do to celebrate and thought: we need something low key.

So the Emperor and I sat down after he got home to snuggle and watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the stop motion film from 1964. Have you seen this like six thousand times? I have. And actually, as a kid, I didn't like it that much. My siblings loved it but I was kinda like "eh". It never held my attention that long. So it was fun to rewatch it as an adult and find that I actually liked the (kind of dumb) humor and thought the movie was really sweet overall. The Emperor seemed to enjoy it too.

We had popcorn night for dinner... with some earth balance, nooch, and special guest, za'atar! Yum!

And, one last piece of good news, and something worth celebrating in its own right: I got the wax paper off of yesterday's caramel! Like I had guessed, the caramel did TOTALLY adhere to the wax paper. The internet did not yield a lot of ideas for how to remove the wax paper-- pretty much everyone seemed to say "well don't use wax paper in the first place, dummy." Not useful! I found one suggestion to use a warmed cookie sheet, but that didn't work for me.

But I was blocking a piece of knitting with an iron, which involves like steaming the piece and holding the iron close but not touching the knit item... and I got the idea to try the same thing with the caramel. And guess what? IT WORKED PERFECTLY. The combination of the heat and the slight amount of water perfectly loosened the wax paper and caused it to slide away from the caramel. My caramel is saved!!! And I think I have enough to send to not one but two friends. Twice as wonderful. I'm so happy!

Who else is happy? This guy:

Spiced sea salt caramels and a BBQ Tofurky (Celebration #8)

2011-12-08T18:26:00.000-08:00

Today I had a celebration by myself, making another treat to mail out to friends: some spiced sea salt caramels. I used my normal caramel recipe* but added in a butt ton of nutmeg, a splash of rum (with vanilla) and a light sprinkle of coarse sea salt on top. It ended up looking pretty okay. Here it is pre-cutting:

Honestly, I haven't cut it into pieces yet and I'm a little terrified that it's going to adhere permanently to the wax paper. I usually use parchment paper but reached for that instead today...

I had the weirdest thing happen while I was making it. I was using not one but two candy thermometers to keep an eye on the temperature because, well, I like a second opinion I guess. So I was sitting and knitting and periodically checking on the temps. After the caramel had been cooking for some time, I checked on it and noticed that both thermometers said that it was at 185F. But it both looked AND smelled done, so I got out a glass of water and tested to see if it was at soft ball state already.

Ha ha ha. No. It was at HARD ball state. This is not chewy caramel. Somehow, despite never going above 185F according to either thermometer, it went straight to pull out your dental work hard. Oopsies.

Oh well, it still tastes really good, and it _didn't_ scorch. I'm still going to mail it, along with a warning note.

As a bonus mini-celebration, I finally broke open a bar of soap that's been burning a hole in my pocket (my soap pocket?!) for several weeks now:

From Paintbox Soapworks, a wonderful soap company on Etsy. I believe they make a couple of lotions with goats milk now, but the soaps are all vegan and they all smell amazing. Comfort and Joy is one of their Yule soaps and it smells in-cred-ible. Like cider and cranberries and pastries and love. Looking forward to using it again and again over the course of the month...

Speaking of over and over again, we had our third Tofurky tonight. I made BBQ sauce (the Backyard BBQ out of Veganomicon) and cooked the Tofurky in it. I was curious as to whether or not it would cook through if cooked in a sauce on the stovetop. And in fact, it did. (It helped that I remembered to set it out to thaw this morning.) It was good but the BBQ sauce totally overpowered the flavor of the Tofurky and the wild rice stuffing.

The Emperor loved it, though. He ate a ton. He ate some broccoli too though I think he mostly filled up on Tofurky.

Here he is sulking about I'm not sure what after dinner:

*2c coconut milk, 2c brown sugar, 1c agave nectar, 1/4 tsp salt, 6 tbsps earth balance, 1 tsp vanilla, mix all but vanilla and cook to 235-238F or desired hardness, remove from heat & put in vanilla)

Gingerbread biscotti & another easy dinner (Celebration #7)

2011-12-07T19:57:00.000-08:00

Today was a good day (and free of medical procedures! no blood draws!). I couldn't sleep last night, which sounds like a bad thing... until you consider that this made me get out of bed at 3:30 a.m. (that's a time! on the clock!) which meant I got to work around 4:30 instead of 5:30. So I got to leave at 1 p.m.! WOO!

I went to a yarn store I hadn't been to before, then went downtown and drank some lemon gingerade Dr. Kefir while knitting in the sunshine for a few hours. Then I met up with a friend I haven't seen in ages, which was wonderful. Finally, I staggered home... getting here just in time to make a quick dinner of whole wheat pasta with (jarred) red sauce, vegan sausage, and spinach. It's not fancy but it was good.

After dinner, the Emperor and I had celebration #7! We made cookies! Making cookies is pretty much his favorite thing on earth (and mine too) and he asks to do it seriously every day. Even at this time of year, when we have so many people we could possibly send cookies to (and these ones are headed right back out of the house, believe me), we can't make cookies EVERY day. So when we do, it's a special treat, both for him and for me.

We made the gingerbread biscotti out of Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I think I blogged about these last month when I made them... news flash, they're still great. This time I made a little bit extra so that we don't have to mail them ALL away. In fact, I made so much extra that I couldn't fit them all on the baking sheet for the second baking so Josh and I had to eat a few. Namely these ones:

I feel a little bad because the Emperor had to go to bed before he got to try them... on the other hand, he ate his fair share of cookie dough while we were mixing them up so he's probably okay. Here he is using a whisk for the first time I can recall and having quite a bit of fun with it:

Lazy dinner & scribble snowmen (Celebration #6)

2011-12-06T20:04:00.000-08:00

Guys, I went to the doctor AGAIN today. I had a normally scheduled appointment with my OB that both she and the Urgent Care doctor wanted me to keep and said appointment revealed some strange stuff and led to yet another blood draw. (Who needs acupuncture when you've got doctors like this?!) Anyway, long story short, we didn't get home until pretty late and needed an easy dinner and an easy celebration.

For dinner we had baba ganoush & hummus from the store with some whole wheat pita. You can tell I am feeling out of sorts because I didn't even cut up any veggies to go with it. Oy.

After dinner, we had our celebration for the day: decorating some snowman cut-outs that we got at the craft store this past weekend. Here's the finished product:

The Emperor is bizarrely obsessed with "Frosty 'Noman" right now and was very very excited to see these. He seemed perplexed by my suggestion that we draw on them though and you can see that I did most of the decorating. He assigned the names, though. I just wrote them. (He told me his name is spelled G R E, which is pretty close to the whole thing. What are they teaching him at preschool?!) I think it's humorous that he scribbled out the faces of both Daddy and Mommy 'Noman but Grey 'Noman remains intact.

I think I'm going to hang up our little crafts somewhere in the house for the holiday season... perhaps on the door between the living room and the kitchen. I think he would get a kick out of seeing them all together. He has been carrying those Christmas trees we made the other day around the house.

Anyhow, that's all for today. I leave you with the Emperor's most recent self-portrait, flattering as always:

Baked potatoes & Emmett Otter's Jugband Christmas (Celebration #5)

2011-12-05T20:03:00.000-08:00

First a health update: I spent most of today at Urgent Care, getting poked and prodded and examined. It turned out to be a good thing that I didn't try to go after work (and instead just stayed home again), because I was there for seriously over 4 hours while they did all sorts of stuff to me. The good news is that there isn't any particularly bad news; it looks like I probably have a mild kidney infection. Now that I think about it, the primary symptoms (fatigue, dizziness, just feeling "wrong") line up pretty closely to the ones I had with the kidney infection I had during my last pregnancy. Soooo I came home with a bunch of antibiotics to hopefully head it off at the pass before we get to the super high fever/chills/delirium/week in the hospital phase like we did last time.

Whew. Are you tired after reading that? I am! We had to have some sort of low key celebration tonight. So I pulled out one of my lazier celebration ideas and watched a movie with the Emperor that I've wanted to rewatch for years: Emmett Otter's Jugband Christmas.

What's weird is that I think I only ever saw it once as a kid, but I've wanted to see it again for years and years. When YouTube was still pretty new, I scoured it hard to see if Emmett Otter would show up there. I looked for it on BitTorrents periodically for a while. Then I totally forgot about it... and now it turns out you can stream it from Netflix. Success!

Hm. I found it... weird. It's not really a Christmas movie per se. Most of the songs in it are not really very great and the muppets aren't that cute or noteworthy. Sadly, not as good as I remembered and I'm a little let down over the whole thing.

The Emperor liked it but I don't think he loooved it either. Alas. Well, not every celebration can be as high octane as yesterday's...

We had a low key dinner as well. I baked some potatoes, Josh made cheezy sauce and steamed some broccoli for us. The Emperor helped make the sauce and was really interested in it at the time and kept telling Josh that it was going to be really yummy. Then, of course, when it was time to eat, he was like NOOOOO NOOOOOOO NOOOOO CHEEZY SAUCE!!!!! Oh well. He ate a huge pile of broccoli (though he made me swap out my florets for his stems; stems are "not yummy") and all of the skin off of a potato and a half. This is why we give him a vitamin, people.

Here he is helping make sauce:

Quince and more galette & a holiday party! (Celebration #4)

2011-12-04T17:17:00.000-08:00

Today we had our 4th celebration: a holiday party at Amey of Vegan Eats & Treats's house! Attended by said Amey & a bunch of the South Bay area PPKers.

Okay, if you want to be technical about it, it was a Thanksgiving party. But a celebration is a celebration, so I'm counting it, guys.

Here's a picture of my plate:

There was SO much good stuff at this party, including TWO kinds of brussels sprouts. (One with hazelnuts, one without.) I said at the party, "two types of brussels sprouts! that's how you know it's a good party!" and I meant it. Man, do I love bsprouts.

Other things: amazing flaky rolls, mac'n'cheez, seitan stuffed with squash and I'm not sure what else, gravy, mushrooms with a rice stuffing (the stuffing was great but mushrooms freak me out so I only ate half of my mushroom), cranberries!!, apple pie, and chocolate bourbon nut balls. All vegan. All delicious.

I made this galette that was loosely based on Deborah Madison's Apple-Quince Mince recipe. I had to change a million things because a) she wanted me to use my food processor which is just not going to happen on a Sunday morning and b) I didn't have two thirds of the stuff it called for. But I'm really happy with the results so I'm recording my version of it anyway.

Quince & More Galette
makes one 9x9 square galette

Filling:
1 large lemon
5 clementines (or 1 navel orange)
3c mixed raisins
1c crystallized ginger, chopped
2 apples, peeled and diced
1 quince, peeled and grated
1/2c dried mango, chopped
1c brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp allspice
1 tsp grated nutmeg (or to taste, you know about me and nutmeg)
1c water
1/3c rum

Galette dough:
1 1/2c all purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsps sugar
10 tbsps non-hydrogenated vegan shortening (such as Spectrum), room temperature
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2c ice water
additional cinnamon & sugar for sprinkling

Filling:
1. Zest the lemon & clementines and set zest aside. Remove pith and seeds from citrus and then chop the remaining citrus, being as gentle as possible so as not to squeeze all the juice out.
2. Put all the ingredients except the rum (zests, chopped citrus, raisins, ginger, apple, quince, mango, sugar, spices, water) into a large saucepan and stir til well combined.
3. Set on medium high heat and bring to a boil. This probably won't take long because there's not that much water in this.
4. When it reaches a boil, give it a stir, cover it, and reduce heat to low. You want it to continue a strong simmer. Cook for 20 minutes, stirring very occasionally.
5. Add the rum and continue to cook, uncovered, for another 10 minutes.
6. Remove from heat and allow to cool while you make the galette.

Galette:
7. Line a 9x9 baking pan with parchment paper.
8. Stir flour, salt, and sugar together until combined.
9. Add shortening by the tablespoonful. Use a pastry cutter to cut the shortening into the flour, aiming for that ever popular pea sized granule of shortening.
10. Sprinkle the vanilla extract over the rest of the bowl. Don't mix in at this point.
11. Add the ice water in, distributing across the rest of the dough. After every couple of tablespoons, stir with a spatula. Stop adding water as soon as the dough comes together. You might not need the whole 1/2c.
12. Form into a disk and wrap in plastic wrap, then refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Assembly:
13. Preheat oven to 450 F.
14. Roll the dough out into a big rectangle between two sheets of wax paper. It should be at least 10x10 but roll it out basically as big as you can without tearing it. Mine ended up more like 12 x 12 this time.
15. Gently transfer the dough sheet into the baking pan and gently scoot it down into the shape of the pan with your fingertips. There should be dough hanging over the edges of the pan on all sides.
16. Scoop filling into the dough. I needed a little over half of the quince etc mixture to fill mine up-- 4c measured out. (Save the rest of the filling for putting on oatmeal or something.)
17. Fold the sides of the dough up and towards the center. You should end up with a square hole in the middle.
18. Sprinkle top of galette with a bit of sugar & cinnamon.
19. Bake at 450F for 15 minutes.
20. Reduce heat to 375F and bake for another 45 minutes until lightly browned, checking every 15 minutes or so.

That's it! Okay, it's a lot of steps, but it was actually not very hard... and tasty enough to be worth doing again.

On that note, here is the Emperor hanging out with Amey's cat Yummers Potatoes:

Peppermint bark & Whiskey reduction ala Josh (Celebration #3)

2011-12-03T19:21:00.000-08:00

For today's celebration, the Emperor and I made peppermint bark together! Peppermint bark is one of those things that I always hear about but never really know what it is. I've eaten it before and prior to yesterday, I still couldn't tell you what was in it other than, well, crushed candy canes.

It just sounds so freakin' holiday-y. I read somewhere that it mails very well, and I have a BUNCH of treat packages that I'm putting together for various people, so I thought it would be nice to try it. After reading a bunch of recipes yesterday and this morning, I realized that there's basically nothing to it: melt some chocolate and stir in some crushed candy canes et voila. Definitely the kind of thing the Emperor and I could do together.

Here's my recipe, for reference. It's not going to be that different than most you'll see except that there's no white chocolate in it.

Peppermint Bark
makes a butt ton; over 2 lbs

1 box of 12 candy canes
4c vegan chocolate chips

NOTE: if you want these to be gluten free (and I did!) you need to make sure that you do NOT use grain sweetened chocolate chips. They're usually the ones I buy but fortunately I made the connection in time!

1. Line two 9x9 baking dishes with wax paper.
2. Remove the plastic from the candy canes.
3. Put the candy canes in a plastic bag and wrap the bag in a towel. Whack the wrapped bag vigorously on a counter, tabletop, or other hard surface. You're done when you have a mix of candy cane dust and some bigger chunks. Separate out the biggest chunks (maybe a 1/3c of chunks) and set aside.
4. Using a double boiler (or a small saucepan inside a large saucepan, if you're awesome like me), melt the 4c of chocolate chips. Stir til totally smooth.
5. Pour in the candy cane dust/smaller pieces of candy cane and mix til incorporated.
6. Pour the mixture into the two prepared baking dishes and smooth out with the spatula.
7. Sprinkle the reserved chunks of candy cane on the tops of the two dishes of peppermint bark and press down gently with your spatula.
8. Refrigerate both dishes for about 30 minutes, until mixture re-solidifies.
9. Break solidified slabs of chocolate down into smaller pieces. (You can pick it up by the wax paper and then whack it on the baking dish, or do something a little more sophisticated like cut it with a really share knife.)

And that's it. This looks long but it's really about the easiest thing ever. It took us maybe 10 minutes of active work to put this together. Here's the finished product:

Would have liked the chunks on top to be smaller, but they're still manageable. I'm pleased with how delicious this stuff turned out. Good thing it's headed right back out of the house!

Josh made actual dinner tonight. He made a lovely whiskey reduction (like the bourbon reduction from MoFo, except with whiskey from Trader Joe's instead of bourbon) and cooked some chik'n strips in it, roasted brussels sprouts with garlic, and then served it all on top of some whole wheat noodles. Very tasty, and not too bad looking either:

We were sad to miss the Christmas parade downtown today but there was just no way it was happening with the way I'm (still) feeling. The good news is that my OB does NOT think this is pregnancy related; the bad news is we still don't know what it is. (Maybe an inner ear infection?) She wants me to go to urgent care but that's the last thing I wanted to spend the weekend doing so... maybe tomorrow morning. Or Monday.

Here's one more of the Emperor. I asked if he could smile really big and he said "yeah!" and then made this face. Classic.

Eggplant Ratatouille (Celebration #2)

2011-12-02T21:36:00.000-08:00

Hello! Brief post tonight because, as you may notice, I am posting rather late. That's because we just got done celebration #2: Josh's work Christmas party.

The party was at La Maison, a French restaurant in Aptos that is not even a little vegan friendly. Fortunately, the administrative lady at Josh's work is pretty hardcore and called ahead and made sure there'd be something there for me, then dogged the restaurant staff on the issue while we were there.

I ended up with a salad, eggplant ratatouille and sorbet with fruit. It was all pretty much okay. The ratatouille was actually pretty good but pretty insubstantial. Really small portion size, especially compared to the meat entrees. Oh well. Still better than expected.

Pictures tomorrow. Of the Emperor too.

Christmas tree cutouts & Tofurky #2 (Celebration #1)

2011-12-01T18:54:00.000-08:00

Guys! November is over! I am kind of glad because jeeeeeez my family was unwell for a lot of the month. Hopefully the end of plague season is at hand. (Josh is coughing raucously as I type this, so maybe I shouldn't speak too soon.)

I'm still feeling way off but I think it's pregnancy related. I kind of would like it to be the flu though-- I really don't want this to be my new normal for the next 6-8 weeks.

Speaking of new: NEW THEME! I am a big old Christmas nerd, and that's the honest truth of the matter. Every year that I've known Josh, we've gone to his parents' house for Christmas, which is great, but this year we can't go because no way are we cramming me and my belly in the car for another 13+ hour drive in this calendar year. So this will be the first in eight! eight! eight! Christmases that we'll be at home and I am soooo excited. While being at home unfortunately means not being with more of our family, it also means that I can go totally crazy doing things we don't normally do at Christmas, like decorating a tree. A TREE!

So I've decided that my theme this month will be holiday celebrations. I'm just going to do something celebratory every day between now and the end of December.

I kicked it off today by doing a simple craft with my main man. I cut out some Christmas tree shapes and some colored balls from construction paper and let him go crazy with some glue and markers. He decorated his tree (right) and then helped with mine (left). And then insisted on hiding both trees and the markers underneath a towel.

He really did go kinda crazy with the glue, too. We're talking both hands in the dish. It took almost 10 minutes to get all the glue out from under his fingernails afterwards.

Couldn't have asked for a nicer way to spend 45 minutes, especially since I am really just not able to be standing up much at all. So good to have something interactive we could do together that was not very physically intense. I'll need to think of some more stuff in this vein...

Dinner! We had tofurky #2 tonight. I popped one of those bad boys in the crockpot along with some chopped veggies (onion, carrot, potato, parsnip) and a couple handfuls of red lentils (to thicken it all up) and covered it all with broth. The end result is very very moist, and surprisingly not salty... thus eradicating both of my major complaints with Tofurky in general. Unfortunately, I have a new complaint about this variant: it's just kinda bland. I put in a ton of dried herbs and expected it to come out tasting maybe a little strong. But in fact, it just tastes kinda savory and not very much like anything.

Not our ultimate Tofurky experience, yet, but don't worry, we have a ton more in the freezer to work through...

Here's your daily Emperor, hard at work on his Christmas tree:

A big bowl of quinoa (Thankfulness #30)

2011-11-30T18:31:00.000-08:00

Thing I'm thankful for #30: blankets.

Is there anything better in the world than curling up with a nice soft blanket when it's cold out or you don't feel well or just when you want to be cozy? No, I don't think so.

My favorite blanket of all time recently passed into the possession of the Emperor. Oh yeah, big news, people: he got his own bed just before Thanksgiving and has actually been sleeping in it every night. He's been using this cottony blanket with rainbows on it that I've had since I was a little kid. (It's a full sized blanket though.) Bittersweet moments for me... I'm so enthralled by all his new developments but I am starting to understand why people sometimes feel like OH NOES MY BABY IS GROWING UP.

Speaking of oh noes, I am still feeling super unwell. So tonight for dinner, we had... a big bowl of quinoa. Really. For Josh and myself, I added some Indian eggplant stuff from a pouch that I found in the cabinet. But that's it. The Emperor was totally thrilled, of course. Me? I feel kinda like the worst mom ever but I really can't stand up and cook right now.

Here's the picture of the Emperor from yesterday. I haven't got a good one of him yet today so this will have to do:

Takeout sushi (Thankfulness #29)

2011-11-29T18:59:00.000-08:00

Thing I'm thankful for #29: wireless internet.

Networking technology has come a fascinatingly long way in the past 50 years... especially in the last 20. It's something I love thinking about. Mobile wireless networks were my focus in grad school and while that didn't pan out for me (long story), I still have a great appreciation and love for the subject.

What does this have to do with food? Um, nothing. Sorry, I am super spacy today. Feeling very unwell.

We had takeout sushi for dinner tonight because it was the only thing I could think of that I was interested in eating. I forgot to take a picture.

The Emperor ate an entire piece of inari sushi (skin as well as rice), a big piece of pickled radish, and the contents of several other pieces of sushi (rice, avocado, orange) but no seaweed. He was mad about the lack of tofu in dinner and the seaweed touching his rice, but otherwise he was very pleased.

I took a picture of him but am too tired to upload right now. I'll add it in tomorrow at work.

Tofurky & kabocha squash (Thankfulness #28)

2011-11-28T18:55:00.000-08:00

Thing I'm thankful for #28: people who read and abide by signs. Particularly cyclists and automobile drivers.

There's a pedestrian bridge that I cross on my way home from work every day. It is a REALLY narrow fit-- you would be hard pressed to get two adults to pass each other shoulder to shoulder. Usually people have to turn sideways and such. There is a BIG sign posted on either end of the bridge asking cyclists to walk their bikes.

Almost no one walks their bikes across it. It drives me crazy. I have lost count of the number of times that people who couldn't be bothered to walk their bikes for 90 seconds have bumped into me with their bikes. It is bad for my soul. It makes me crabby.

So when I have a day where I actually see someone else with a bike walking theirs across this bridge, it brightens my day. Ditto for people who read and abide by signs saying to share the road with cyclists in areas where there is no bike lane. And likewise for people who read and abide by the no parking in the bike lane signs that are on part of my route (and where there is almost always a car parked). Ayup.

I asked Josh to stop at the store today and see if Tofurkeys were half off. They usually are right after Thanksgiving. I wanted to try cooking one in the crockpot per a suggestion on the PPK.

He came home with six of them.

We had Tofurkey #1 for dinner tonight, with some kabocha squash:

The Emperor wouldn't try the Tofurky at Thanksgiving or the day after. But today? He was all about it. He ate two big slices. He also tried the kabocha squash but after thoughtfully eating one cube of it, told me that it was not yummy and that he did not want anymore. Alas. I'm happy that he tried.

I think I've taken more or less exactly this picture of him before:

Noodles'n'tofu (Thankfulness #27)

2011-11-27T19:52:00.000-08:00

Guys, I am just not feeling very thankful today. I'm crabby. I don't want to go back to work. I don't feel good. I didn't have a restful vacation and blah and blah and blah.

Maybe it's days like this when it's most important to reflect on what's good in one's life. Grumble.

Thing I'm thankful for #27: that I have a home to come home to, both physically and mentally.

We live in an awesome house right now. It's the first place we've lived in a long time (maybe ever?) that I didn't dread coming back to after being away. There are no animals living in the walls, no stompy neighbors upstairs keeping us awake at all hours, no mystery mold, no motorcycles on adjacent highways, etc, etc. I really like it here. I hope it stays good.

Here's tonight's dinner, courtesy of Josh. Noodles and tofu and misc vegetables he found in the freezer. Pretty tasty.

The Emperor helped him cook it. It was quite entertaining to listen to their banter from the living room. At one point the Emperor declared that the yellow noodles were his FAVORITE and kept going on that vein for some time. He also learned the word "marinade" today and used it quite extensively. There was a tense moment when Josh accidentally called the marinade a sauce but we seem to have sailed through that... the Emperor went on to eat big pile of tofu and noodles, despite them being covered in marinade and vegetables.

We stopped at this weird strip mall megaplex thing on the way home that has a cool outdoor kid area with a train and a carousel. The Emperor ran around like a little crazy person. I think his very favorite thing was this wall with a bunch of doors and windows in it for taking photographs. It's been his favorite thing when we've been here in the past too. Here he is peeking out of the bunny window:

Martolli's Pizza in Ashland, OR (Thankfulness #26)

2011-11-26T20:07:00.000-08:00

Okay, I am writing this on my phone in the car, so please excuse typos or weird formatting. We're still a ways out from Red Bluff, our stopover town, so I'm writing now so I don't wuss out later.

Thing I'm thankful for #26: that the Emperor is a good car traveler.

One thing I was dreading about parenthood/having kids was not being able to travel as much. I love traveling-- pretty much anywhere, for any reason. Finances and limited free time mean that most of my travel has traditionally been by car (and before that, by bus) and fortunately, the Emperor is great with car travel.

We stopped in Ashland in time for a quick stop at the park and then dinner at Martolli's pizza. Excellent pizza with vegan options. I wish their menu was explicit about whether or not the soy cheese is vegan. I wanted to ask but it was super busy so I just ordered and hoped... I don't think it was dairy-y but not sure. Couldn't quite recognize the brand-- reminded me of Teese maybe?

Anyway, if you'd rather not take the risk, they're also happy to make totally cheeseless pizzas. Always nice to see that option on the menu.

The Emperor ate about a slice of pizza. He made me pick off thr kalamata olives, which he generally loves. Just not on pizza?! After dinner, he asked me, "what flavor was that pizza?" and I told him it was plain with garlic and he told me "I *love* garlic!" You and me both guy.

BBQ Tempeh Burger at Grilla Bites (Thankfulness #25)

2011-11-25T19:00:00.000-08:00

Well, why not finish out the month with a couple more thankful things? I think I can probably think of six more...

Thing I'm thankful for #25: that I have in-laws who I like and have a good relationship with.

So many people have struggles with their in-laws, enough so that whenever I start a story with "my mother-in-law..." I can see some people visibly cringe/brace themselves for some horror story. I'm fortunate that my in-laws are lovely people, really thoughtful and kind and generous in nature. I look forward to visiting them, even if I weary of 13 hour drives and such.

Speaking of 13 hour drives, we'll be heading home tomorrow. Ugggggh. Already. Not sure what I'll do about posting, but I think I'm going to *try* to do at least a short post at some point.

Tonight we had Thanksgiving leftovers for dinner, and since that's not too excited, I'm posting a picture of a meal we had on the way here. We have been stopping in Ashland, OR on our trips up here over the past year so that the Emperor can play in the very excellent park there. Each time we're there, we try to eat somewhere different. This time we stopped at Grilla Bites, which is a sandwich shop (small chain?) that is supposedly really vegan friendly.

Which is sort of true. The only thing I saw on their menu that looked vegan without substitutions was the PB&J in the kid's menu. Some of the other stuff might have been vegan but it's hard to say because it wasn't marked. They did note that they use vegenaise for mayo on everything, and had options for "soy cheese" (vegan? not vegan? menu didn't specify) and veggie burgers (vegan? not vegan? menu didn't specify) and tempeh burgers. I got a BBQ tempeh burger, which looked like this:

The tempeh was just a slab of steamed tempeh. Really, I don't think it was cooked at all beyond that. Not bad, just really bland. The rest of the sandwich was good though. The bread was very nice, and you know how I like bread. Overall, not awful, not great, just sorta in the middle.

Here's the Emperor sprawling out this morning in a rare moment of stillness:

Happy Thanksgiving! (Thankfulness #24)

2011-11-24T18:01:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope that everyone out there reading this got to do or eat *something* enjoyable today. I did, and while my day was not without stress, there were plenty of good points...

Thing I'm thankful for #24: The Emperor.

Awww. I don't know, what else do I have to say about this? This guy lights up my days, even while simultaneously driving me mad. After his nap today, he was snuggling with me and he leaned in and pressed his face to mine and said, "Mommy, I really love you." Then he tried to stick his fingers in my mouth or something. Still, it was so sweet.

We had a pretty good plate of dinner:

Tofurky roast, sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts with pecans (mmmm), mashed potatoes (I didn't end up eating mine), apple-thyme rolls, wild rice stuffing, cranberry ginger chutney. There was fruit salad too but I had no room for it at all.

My sister-in-law made an excellent vegan pumpkin pie (the Voluptuous Vegan recipe) which was almost my thankful thing for today because damn that was some good pie. They also brought Soyatoo with them-- so the Emperor has now had whipped cream for the first time. I think it blew his little mind.

Oh, that and the cranberry chutney. He ate fruit salad, rolls, and cranberry chutney and nothing else from dinner... but he enjoyed those three things enough to make up for the rest of it. He was particularly impressed with the cranberries and really pounded them. Here he is eating his last bite of fruit salad, with some cranberry dregs still on his face:

Tofu & bok choy udon bowl (Thankfulness #23)

2011-11-23T20:43:00.000-08:00

We made it to Oregon, finally, after way way way too long in the car. I'm about falling over tired so let's get right to it:

Thing I'm thankful for #23: copious rest stops along the interstate between California and Oregon.

Self-explanatory people.

Look at this great dinner that was waiting for us:

Baked tofu and bok choy in a ginger-garlicky broth with nice fat udon. Yummmmm. There were also rice crackers and apple slices.

The Emperor ate a ton of tofu and rice crackers and apple but would not touch the noodles. I think he had just stuffed himself by the time he found them in his bowl.

Here he is at the beginning of dinner. You can tell he is VERY intent on eating this meal:

A brief discussion of road food (Thankfulness #22)

2011-11-22T09:48:00.001-08:00

Okay, here is my compromise! Since I am not expecting us to hit the hotel until ~10 p.m. tonight and I just can't commit to writing a blog post that late (10 p.m. people... I am usually asleep by 9, and often by 8:30!), I am writing you one on my break at work instead. The downside of this is that there's no dinner picture (it's not dinner time yet) and no Emperor picture from today (I haven't seen him awake today yet) but work with me people!

Thing I am thankful for #22: ZANTAC.

Zantac? Zantac. Anti-heartburn medication. I know I have complained about it a little here already, but I have had heartburn more or less non-stop for 3 or 4 days now and maybe 50% of the days in the two or three weeks before that. It's just getting to the point where newbaby is so big that he's crushing my stomach all the time, so if I eat (or drink, even water) just a tiny bit too much (which is to say, still 50% less than I would need to eat to feel full), I have a first class ticket booked on the acid express.

With the Emperor, I had heartburn/reflux for almost all of my pregnancy and didn't really think to do anything but take tums and papaya extract for it. This time I asked around for recommendations and kept getting told zantac by other pregnant ladies. And guess what? It's working for me! Yaaaaay!

Let's talk car food a little bit. One of the things that I actually really like about long road trips is picking out snack food to take in the car. Even before I went vegan, I didn't do fast food... so as long as I've been doing road trips, I've been picking out and packing yummies. I did a post last year solely devoted to the food we took in the car on the way to Thanksgiving in Oregon.

Josh always insists on a large quantity of Red Vines. I usually like to have some sort of genuine people food with us like sandwiches... last Thanksgiving we made vegan pigs in blankets and brought them. The Emperor is somewhere in between. He'll happily nosh on fruit in the car but he also loves to eat these baked snap pea crackers (which are soooooo messy) and basically any other snack you offer him. It's like the car magically makes all food appealing to him. Maybe we need to start having dinner in the car...

I'm not sure what we'll take as car snack this time. Josh is in charge of acquiring things because I have to go straight from work to a doctor's appointment, which we're (fingers crossed) hoping to leave right after. It doesn't look like it'll be quite the feast we had last year but I trust he'll pick something good.

Speaking of last year, here's a picture of the Emperor and me on our way to Oregon! There was SNOW! Jeez I hope there's not snow this time. I am so not prepared for that.

Potpie leftover noodle surprise (Thankfulness #21)

2011-11-21T20:13:00.000-08:00

Thing I'm thankful for #21: the amount of stability in my life at this point.

This time of year often makes me reflect on this, as I spend a lot of time thinking about my family. I grew up in a very unstable environment with people who, while wonderful on many levels, were not what you would call reliable or predictable. Sometimes I look at my life now and I think, how pleasantly dull this all is!

Speaking of pleasantly dull, here's tonight's dinner:

It's some of the leftovers from last night (the part that was in the pie shell, and the remains of the pie shell) mixed up with some whole wheat noodles and Trader Joe's chicken-less strips. Not fancy, but it took about 15 (almost entirely inactive) minutes to make and it was actually quite tasty. The Emperor got plain noodles and chickie strips and was delighted. He ate a huge bowl of noodles with seriously nothing on them. He was so disappointed when he finished them and there were no more plain noodles to be had.

We're leaving for Oregon tomorrow and I'm really not sure if I'll do a blog post or not. We plan to overnight in Red Bluff, CA but probably won't get to the hotel until like 10 p.m. or not. I'm dismayed by the thought of missing a post (I've been going for 51 days straight now!) but we'll see.

Here is the Emperor helping me pack. Helping me pack the Emperor, that is.

Vegetable potpie (Thankfulness #20)

2011-11-20T19:57:00.000-08:00

Well, today was a very up and down day. At the end of it, I am just brutally tired... which segues into:

Thing I am thankful for #20: That this pregnancy has been about 100% easier physically than the one with the Emperor was.

With the Emperor, I was sick throughout the whole thing... had a kidney infection that put me in the hospital for a week... stopped exercising at 32 weeks (which is what I am now! and still going strong!) because I felt so poorly... suffered non-stop heartburn for months, and all manner of other gastric disturbances... my hands were totally numb for a couple of months... and I just generally had a lot to complain about physically. This time? Other than being incredibly tired all the time (which may just be related to, you know, working full time and being one of the primary caretakers for a 2 year old) and constantly pulling muscles in my pelvis, I've felt fine.

I am fortunate in that I have experienced very little swelling of note in this pregnancy or the last, but I have found that when I am on my feet too long, they just ache and throb. So it was probably foolish of me to get out of bed, stand up in the kitchen cooking (pancakes!) with the Emperor, then go out for a long walk with the same, then go on a lengthy grocery shopping expedition with the same, then carry the same home on my back, then spend the afternoon/evening on my feet in the kitchen cooking more stuff (two things for presents, and then potpie for dinner). But, well, all of this was pretty fun, so I guess I can't complain too much...

The Emperor is SO in to helping me cook recently. He has a step stool that he pulls up to the counter and stands on while helping me mix things and trying to convince me that everything needs more cinnamon. It's very sweet and cute and a good way to pass the time, especially on a rainy ol' day like this.

He got really mad when I wouldn't let him help with dinner, but there just wasn't space-- the counter was covered with my other two projects (gingerbread biscotti and spiced pecans) cooling and that's just a recipe for disaster. So he sulked in the living room while I put together this potpie. Which he then refused to eat even one bite of. Oh well.

It's the potpie stew from Appetite for Reduction, poured into a pie shell. The original recipe makes an incredible quantity of filling-- the book says 6 servings and I am a big eater and I still think it's more like uh, 1.5 to 2 times that many servings-- so only about 1/5 of it ended up in the pie shell. The rest I put into the freezer, working towards slooooowly building up my stash of things to eat once this baby is born.

It took me all day to get a picture of the Emperor where he wasn't looking super crabby or crying about something. (Did I mention it has been an up and down day? It really has.) Finally got this one while he was brushing his teeth before bed:

Worth the wait.

Orange-persimmon salad & red rice (Thankfulness #19)

2011-11-19T19:11:00.000-08:00

Thank you to everyone who sent me well wishes etc yesterday... today was a MUCH better day on every level. Basically any day that I'm at home with my family is going to be a good day, and today was really nice. In part because I got the most incredible, most thoughtful package of presents I think I've ever gotten from *anyone*, which leads right into:

Thing I'm thankful for #19: how incredibly thoughtful, caring, and generous totally random strangers can be.

Now I don't even know how to start to explain this package to anyone who isn't familiar with the Switch Witch secret Santa-esque swaps on the BPAL forums. (If that means nothing to you, don't worry, just roll with it.) But let me put it this way: someone who got randomly paired up with me spent like two months straight paying attention to all the dumb stuff I say online and figuring out what my interests etc are, and then used that information to put together a package of things that she knew would delight me. EVERY thing in this package was so incredibly tailored to my tastes that I teared up a little opening it because sheesh, how incredibly sweet and nice and wonderful. I am so, so, so touched by this.

I hope the package that I sent out made my recipient (yet another person) feel half as good as this one made me feel.

On the food front: we actually ate something really tasty and not totally boring for dinner tonight. I saw this recipe for Persimmon & Orange Salad in the New York Times earlier this week and really wanted to try it even though I usually don't really find the idea of savory things and sweet things together appealing. I made about a 3/4 recipe and served it on top of Bhutanese red rice (another random grain from my random grain cabinet) cooked in a bit of veggie broth. It made enough that Josh and I could have good sized portions with a small amount leftover... I really don't think a full recipe would serve 8-10 but perhaps as a (smallish) side.

Salad before dishing out.

Salad with dressing & rice.

It was actually really quite tasty... the dressing made the flavors pop and helped it not feel overwhelmingly sweet. I loved the pairing of the persimmon and the orange. Persimmon is one of my favorite west coast fruit discoveries but I skipped them last year (can't remember why) and was so happy to be reunited. The only thing I felt like the salad was missing was like nuts or something. Maybe toasted walnuts? Maybe next time.

The Emperor ate some orange slices and a couple of bites of rice but honestly, he was still full from GORGING himself on pumpkin flax cookies that were in that awesome package earlier in the day. Really-- I got 2 cookies out of I'm not sure how many. (8? 10?) They were so good, but he was enjoying them SO much that I ceded some of my cookie rights to him. The things we do for love, people... I guess I felt a little generous myself this afternoon.

Here he is post-cookies. I should have taken a video because he was saying "THANK YOU FOR COOKIES, FRIEND!" over and over.

Potato-leek soup, salad, garlic bread (Thankfulness #18)

2011-11-18T19:31:00.001-08:00

Today was the pits. It really was. But guess what?! It's almost over and tomorrow is THE WEEKEND. Also, I just got out of the tub from a nice bubble bath and even though I am still achy all over and have a laundry list of grievances (as John Darnielle would say), I am actually starting to feel semi-cheerful again.

Thing I am thankful for #18: JOSH!

(Ha ha ha. Look at what a little mister chubby face the Emperor used to be!)

I have been saving this one because well, it's so obvious. Of *course* I'm thankful for Josh! Also, I don't want him to get too pleased with himself if I laud him on the internet. Don't want him getting any ideas.

But he merits extra mention today. Here are four things he did today that I am thankful for:

1. He loaded the dishwasher. (No joke, this is a fast and easy way to my heart.)

2. After a toner cartridge exploded on me at work and I was freaking out, he came and picked me up so I wouldn't have to bike home in distress/in the rain.

3. When I charred the garlic bread, he did not react by sitting down on the kitchen floor and crying (my reaction). Instead he carefully scraped off the burnt parts for us so we could eat the garlic bread.

4. He consented to the Emperor's unrelenting demands to watch an episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which let me spend another 10 minutes in the bath tub by myself and gave me adequate time to towel off and put on clean jammies.

He is pretty good.

Dinner tonight: not as good. Well, not bad, just uninspired. I was in no mood to cook, so we just had potato-leek soup from a carton, garlic bread (burnt, but salvaged) and some salad. Here's the salad and the garlic bread:

Isn't that the saddest food picture?

The Emperor helped me make the garlic bread and really loved eating it, even though it was not really very good. Here he is enjoying a piece:

OATMEAL! (Thankfulness #17)

2011-11-17T18:56:00.000-08:00

So I have been trying not to use thankful things that are kind of lame but um, this one keeps floating to the surface and so I'm just going to go with it...

Thing I'm thankful for #17: Skyrim! And having a little time to play it here and there.

I've been hotly anticipating the video game Skyrim for like, um, four or five years. It was released about a week ago and after playing it in every moment I could squeeze out of my day (which is not a lot of moments... certainly not a bucketful of moments) for a week, I can say that it was worth the wait. So. Much. Fun. Sometimes it's just so nice to be able to immerse oneself in a world other than this one and, well, to know that no matter how bad of choices you make, you can always just reload if you need to. Sometimes I wish real life had that feature.

Anyway, if you've noticed that we've been having low intensity meals this week... that's part of why. I get home about 2:30 and the Emperor gets home about 5:30 so that's my window for playing a game. I could *easily* play this game for 3 hours straight, but of course, dinner needs to get made, I need to shower, stuff like that.

Tonight was another very laid back dinner... one I've been dreaming of all week. OATMEAL!

Nothing too fancy here people. Just oats + equal parts unsweetened soymilk and water. Cook til desired thickness, then stir in about 2 tbsps brown sugar, 1/4c raisins, 1/4c walnuts, 1 tbsp (or to taste; I like a lot) cinnamon. Top with a pat of earth balance if you like that sort of thing. EAT.

And eat we did. I had a big bowl, Josh had a big bowl, the Emperor had a small (but not unreasonably so) bowl. He really liked it except for the walnuts, which he kept fishing out and giving back to me. He did try one, to his credit, but he was just not into it. Weird, he usually really likes nuts. Maybe it was just the combo of the oatmeal texture + sort of hard walnuts.

We stopped at the grocery store on the way home from preschool (I went with Josh to pick him up tonight, because he was going from home->preschool because oh yeah, he was home early with the plague again) to get raisins and walnuts and brown sugar. Here is the Emperor at the checkout:

Little Shanghai takeout (Thankfulness #16)

2011-11-16T18:43:00.000-08:00

Thing I'm thankful for #16: weekends!

My job is really grinding me down right now, and that's the truth of it people. I'm trying to stay cheerful and upbeat but it's a lot of work at present. So right now, the thing I'm thankful for is the fact that I have two whole days a week where I don't have to go to my job, I just get to spend time with the people I love doing the stuff that I like doing. (Well, and chores and errands and the other stuff one always ends up doing on the weekend, but that's life.) Weekends: what a good invention!

Between work stress and then another time commitment, I was just totally wiped out today so we got takeout for dinner from Little Shanghai. That's the place in town that has vegan things labeled clearly on their menu. They make this dish that I like a lot which they call Vegetable Cho:

They're basically balls of chickpeas and some vegetables rolled up, fried, and covered in sauce. They're not nearly as heavy or greasy as you might expect them to be. (They don't really oversauce terribly either.) I've been looking for a recipe for them since the first time I had them; I think they're actually very similar (if not identical?) to an Indian dish, vegetable chop. DIfferent seasonings, and no potatoes... but I think that's their origin.

Josh got some tofu in sauce. The Emperor was THRILLED with our dinner selection. We have eaten at little Shanghai once and had takeout from there maybe 2 times other than this in the past year... but apparently it has made a big impression. His first three sentences to me this evening were:

1. It's Grey!
2. Take my shoes off Mommy!
3. I want to eat CHINESE FOOD!

And eat he did. He had a ton of the brown rice we got to go with our entrees, a bunch of Josh's tofu, and even one of my cho balls. He asked for seconds of everything, which is quite uncommon for him. And everything except the rice clearly had sauce on it, yet he ate it. How fascinating! I sometimes wish I knew what goes on in his head.

Here it is clear that what is going on in his head is WHEEEEEE GLOWSTICKS:

GF Smoky Mac'n'veggies (Thankfulness #15)

2011-11-15T18:22:00.000-08:00

Thing I'm thankful for #15: all the wonderful vegan bloggers out there. Though the vegan blog-o-sphere has slowed a bit now that MoFo is over, I still find someone posting something delightful every day, something that inspires me or makes me think. That's really cool.

Tonight's dinner: gluten-free smoky mac'n'cheez with special guest star, quinoa shells!

Now let's talk about these quinoa shells. I saw them on sale a while ago and thought I would try them. (They are always prohibitively expensive here.) It wasn't til I got home that I realized that the first ingredient in the quinoa pasta is... wait for it... wait for it... CORN. Um. Shouldn't it be called *corn* pasta? Anyway, it's been in my cabinet since then, not because I hate corn but because I keep forgetting I had it/getting distracted by all the other grains in there.

Tonight I thought of it because I was thinking of Cara from Fork and Beans, whose birthday is today! Say happy birthday to her if you haven't already! She's a gluten-free lady and this made me think of doing a GF dinner. So I used the "quinoa" shells and made a cheezy sauce based roughly on one in the Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook, with soy flour in it instead of wheat flour. (Why soy flour? It was the first thing I found in the freezer.) Originally I was just going to make it sorta orange with paprika but I dumped in a little too much smoked paprika. And then I thought, hell, why not throw in some TVP-based smoky bits too? Throw caution to the wind!

The end result was pretty good. I enjoyed it. I served it with the last of like three different bags of frozen vegetables because we're out of everything except eggplants (not with mac) and carrots (didn't want today) right now.

The Emperor would not touch it. He literally shrieked in horror when he saw the mac. He pointed at it, huffed several times, and then told me, "that is NOT yummy mommy." Nevermind that he didn't even try it. Oh well. He ate some peas and some broccoli and I suppose if that's all he wants for dinner...

Here he is making an odd face while listening to one of his favorite songs after dinner:

Daal with kale and quinoa (Thankfulness #14)

2011-11-14T18:13:00.000-08:00

Woo woo! Monday is almost over for the week! Isn't that great? I have to tell you that after this weekend, I just didn't feel well rested and when the alarm clock went off this morning, I did NOT want to get up and go. (Our alarm clock records a sound and uses it as the alarm, and the Emperor very helpfully changed it to say MOMMMMMMYYYYYYYYYYYYY yesterday... which certainly did alarm me this morning.)

In my semi-sleep deprived state, I thought of a great thing I am thankful for!

Thing I'm thankful for #15: OATS!

Guys, I eat so many oats these days. I'm like a spoiled pony. (Hmm... I eat a lot of apples too.) My normal breakfast right now is a bowl of healthyish granola with unsweetened soy or almond milk. Later, at work, I usually have a snack/mini-meal of soy yogurt + more granola. And though I've resisted it to this point, at the end of the day, I keep finding myself thinking that what I'd really like for dinner is... a big warm bowl of oatmeal. Mmmm.

Reasons why oats are the perfect food: they have protein! they have fiber! they have a cool texture! they taste good with EVERYTHING! they cook fast! they keep really well! they're CHEEEEEEEAP! Oh man, I love oats.

Maybe we really will have oatmeal for dinner some night this week. But not tonight. Tonight we had another wonderful cheap/fast/easy combo of foods: red lentils with kale and quinoa, and a tarka made out of cumin + coriander seed + mustard seed + some random dried peppers I had.

Really tasty and filling, and requiring almost no work on my part. Some people might look at this and think "sheesh, typical vegan food!" but you know why it's typical... because it's freakin' good.

The Emperor first told me repeatedly that he wanted me to eat his "quinoa rice" while pushing his bowl at me... then once it became clear that I was not going to do such a thing, he demanded his bowl back and ate a ton of quinoa but nothing else. He considered the kale but was freaked out because I cooked it in the lentils so it did have traces of lentils on it. When he finished, he looked over at Josh and said, "I think Daddy is full of dinner." He was intensely irritated when he proceeded to sit at the table and chat for some time after that while I finished my dinner. Parents! Are they just the worst or what?!

Here's a picture of him looking a bit weary of our dinner conversation:

Ginger-garlic tofu with special guest, black rice! (Thankfulness #13)

2011-11-13T18:48:00.000-08:00

For those playing along at home, our past week was-- Tuesday: Emperor sent home from preschool with suspected pinkeye, Wednesday: Emperor home with probably pinkeye, Thursday: both Josh & I feeling a little run down at work, Emperor fine, Friday: Emperor struck by stomach illness, Saturday: I'm struck by stomach illness and Josh developing cold, Sunday: Josh - cold fully developed. I'm hoping our whirlwind tour of every illness ever is over at this point. If you think it's gross to read on a primarily food blog, you should know that it's gross to live it too people!

Anyway, since the Emperor and I were both better today after being trapped in the house for like a million years, we made a point of going out and having fun today. We went to the park for an hour and a half pre-nap and then after nap we went on a coffee date. Which leads me into today's:

Thing I'm thankful for #13: Amey! Do you know Amey from Vegan Eats & Treats? She is a wonderful lady, extremely sweet and talented too. And she has cute dogs. She came to meet us for coffee date today at the Delmarette, which was so nice. You may not know this, but I am an eXtreeeeme! introvert in my real life. Even though I've lived in Santa Cruz for almost five years, I really don't know a lot of people here and honestly I'm horrible about meeting new people. So I really cherish the friends I have here. I'm thankful for all of you, but only Amey went to coffee with me today, ha ha.

The Emperor and I spent so long out at coffee that we had to put together a pretty lazy and fast dinner together when we got home. I was thinking brown rice in the rice cooker + ginger-garlic tofu (based on a recipe in Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian) + broccoli. But then TRAGEDY struck! I went to get brown rice from our big rice bin and... the bin is full of MOTHS. MOTHS, people. In my RICE. Even though I buy grains from the bulk bins constantly, I have really never had a bugs in grains issue before. (I've seen bugs in flour, but interestingly, *not* bulk bin flour.) I was not prepared for moths in my rice. I kinda freaked out.

Luckily, my grains & legumes cabinet is totally ridiculous so I fished around til I found something else I could make in my rice cooker, some black Japonica rice-- actually a combo of short grain black and medium grain mahogany, according to the bag-- that I don't remember buying. (Maybe I got it as a backup for J in MoFo?) No moths there, and it's basically just brown rice that is a different color, so I cooked that stuff up and served it.

The Emperor LOVED it. It's funny, I was telling Amey how lately he mostly likes to eat just one item on his plate-- usually the one he's most familiar with/likes the most. He might try one bite of something else, but he'll only really work on one item. Usually I give him three things-- I aim for a protein, a carb, and a green for most dinners-- and he'll eat a lot of one, one bite of another, and none of the third thing. And that's exactly what he did tonight, except instead of doing what I guessed he'd do (eat a ton of tofu, eat one bite of broccoli, ignore the rice), he went to town on the rice, had one big piece of broccoli, and totally refused the tofu. The tofu! Didn't see that coming.

Here he is eating some grapes while we had our coffee date:

PS that coffee was INCREDIBLE. I love the Delmarette.

Citrus spice muffins (Thankfulness #12)

2011-11-12T18:09:00.000-08:00

Thing I'm thankful for #12: that little kids recover quickly from illness.

On the upside: the Emperor has made a full recovery and seems to be more or less totally fine today. I'm so happy/relieved about this... it's so sad when he's sick. He is such a vivacious little person normally, and when he's sick he just becomes so limp and miserable. Poor guy. He recovers fast, though.

On the downside: sometime in the early afternoon, after having felt totally fine this morning, I suddenly began experiencing dramatic gastric woes. Aha. The Emperor must have passed the curse on to me. So, no real dinner for me tonight (more on that momentarily, so here's what I made for breakfast instead. I wanted to make something that would be fairly gentle on the Emperor's stomach and after trying to sell him on pancakes for some time (usually one of his favorite foods, but apparently an abhorrent thought today), we made these together instead:

My iPhone really didn't want to focus on these muffins. Really annoying. This is the best shot I got.

These are based on the lemon-poppy seed muffins out of Vegan Brunch made with a combination of lemon & orange, without poppy seeds (wasn't sure if Emperor would eat them, was feeling anxious after him not eating anything of consequence yesterday), but with cinnamon (he was helping and insisted we add some) and some extra orange extract added. Very tasty but I slightly overbaked them... they came out a little too crispy.

The Emperor liked them, but only ate about half of one over the course of two or three hours. He took it slow this morning.

What he really liked was dinner tonight. Somehow this didn't go into the laziest dinners week here, but it really should have. Tonight was popcorn night! Where we just eat popcorn for dinner. I used to think this was crazy when I first met Josh, but apparently his family did it every week when he was growing up and he and his brother aren't malnourished or anything. And, well, it is very easy and everyone pretty much loves it. We got an air popper a few years ago and have never looked back.

Here's the Emperor enjoying his:

No food/sick kid (Thankfulness #11)

2011-11-11T18:29:00.001-08:00

Oogadie boo, people. Oogadie boo. This has been a bit of a week for the Emperor healthwise. He's feeling better from his maybe-pinkeye... but it's a good thing preschool was closed for Veteran's Day today because he's had a stomach ailment all day today. How can you tell he's not feeling well? He asked to come home from the park (instead of having to be dragged away) even though it was raining, his favorite thing. And he hasn't wanted to eat *anything*. Sad to see him in such a state.

But don't worry, he's getting lots of fluids and lots and lots of snuggles. And we had a very nice bubble bath after non-dinner. Which leads to today's...

Thing I'm thankful for #11: bubble baths! And cruelty free bubble bath related products.

Isn't this a sweet package? I'm participating in a winter themed swap on a forum I read and got this little bundle of Lush stuff from the person who is spoiling me. Awwww.

Baths are, in my mind, the ultimate form of relaxation. If I could somehow find the time to relax in one every day, I probably would. When we lived in our last place, we only had a shower, no bath, so I went almost *two years* with no baths. Imagine how delighted I was to move somewhere with a tub! Once I discovered that the Emperor also really liked taking bubble baths, we started taking one together at least twice a week. It gives me an excuse to buy nice bath stuff from time to time... one bubble bar will last us a couple of weeks, which is not bad. We recently got some nice powdered bubble bath that's lasted us almost two months and is still going strong.

What's cool is that you can find all sorts of vegan friendly, non animal tested bath stuff on the internet these days. There's Lush, of course, but also scores and scores of lovely e-tailers who sell through places like etsy and will make whatever your little heart desires. Type "vegan bubble bar" into the search on Etsy and you can waste quite a bit of time trawling through the results, drooling over lovely looking and sounding things. Ah, bath stuff.

Well, I really don't have anything foodwise to talk about. We had takeout for dinner (Engfer's) because we were hoping the Emperor would eat some plain vegan pizza. He was really enthusiastic about it until we actually had it, when he rejected it outright. So since I got home from work at noon, he's had a couple of bites of apple, a plain piece of bread (no crust) and just now he's eaten about half a banana. Even for a little guy, that's just not much. :/ Hoping he's feeling a little better tomorrow.

Here's today's bonus picture, which I snapped during naptime, right before I laid down to get a little rest with him. Doesn't he look peaceful?

Chik'n'kale burritos (Thankfulness #10)

2011-11-10T19:38:00.000-08:00

So today was a bit of a challenge after last night. The Emperor ended up having a HUGE melt down that meant he didn't go to sleep until almost an hour after his normal bedtime, and then he woke up several times in the night upset. No rest for him = no rest for me so I was pretty close to hysterical when I got up for work this morning. Getting through work without falling asleep at my desk was a bit of a challenge but-- I had something really fun waiting for me at the other end! Lunch with friend Alana! Which leads right into:

Thing I'm thankful for #10: having access to a variety of restaurants with vegan options.

Didn't manage to snap a picture of it because I was too busy visiting... but we went to Cafe Gratitude's Santa Cruz branch, which opened a couple of months ago where Asana Tea House used to be. I am not thrilled with the whole reciting positive affirmations about oneself in order to order food thing, but I figure that these guys must be doing something right foodwise to still be in business despite that. Josh has refused to go there with me so I was glad to find a friend who was willing to chance it! Other than the shouty birthday song (which happened twice while we were there), I thought the atmosphere was nice and non-creepy. The food was great. The chai was good too.

While Cafe Gratitude is the only all vegan restaurant in SC that I can think of right now, we're lucky to have a lot of places that have at least some token offering for vegans. The Saturn is probably the most well known, but there's also: Dharma's (vegetarian, almost everything has a vegan option), Cafe Delmarette (usually at least one sandwich and one salad are vegan), Planet Fresh Burritos (vegan options), Malabar (vegan options), Little Shanghai (vegan options, which are VERY clearly marked on the menu, which I appreciate), Pearl of the Ocean (vegan options, Sri Lankan food!), Sitar (some buffet options always vegan & marked; some things on their fixed menu vegan but you have to ask for confirmation), Real Thai Kitchen (vegan options), Mobo Sushi (creative, well marked vegan rolls... not just cucumber rolls), Engfer's Pizzaworks (they make my favorite vegan pizza), Hula's (some of the tofu things are vegan; nothing's marked though so you need to ask for confirmation) and on and on. Even Chocolat has a vegan chocolate cake (not marked on the menu; ask about it) and one of their hot chocolates is vegan (the coconut milk one, I think).

I could keep going but I'm getting a bit sleepy and those are probably my favorite places with veg options in Santa Cruz right now. There are some other places I could name that aren't really restaurants (New Leaf, vegan sandwich options & deli salads and such) and some places I'm not going to name that I can care for. While I don't think Santa Cruz is the best place I've ever lived restaurant-wise (Worcester, MA has a ton of freakin' variety... surprisingly good food town), there ARE a ton of places to get some good vegan grub. More than just the Saturn.

Phew. Want to see my dinner? Here is my dinner. Very basic burritos with kale and Trader Joe's chik'n strips. I was going to write up a recipe for it but really I just threw in some spices I liked and cooked some things and mixed it together. Mmmm, stuff in a tortilla.

The Emperor ate an entire tortilla and precisely one chik'n strip, then declared that he was full. I had torn his tortilla in half. He took this as a sign to put an entire half of a full-sized tortilla in his mouth at once. Josh then tore the other half of the tortilla into four or five more strips to keep him from doing the same thing over again... and he picked up the strips and jammed them all into his mouth at once. One of these days, he's going to dislocate his jaw or something.

Here he is looking cute though, hearing a book before bedtime:

Roasted root vegetables & tofu (Thankfulness #9)

2011-11-09T19:33:00.000-08:00

Today was a long day, but a good one. I went to work for about 5 hours and then came home to swap off with Josh so he could go in a bit. (The Emperor is home today with the pink eye.) Half a work day + almost a full day of the Emperor = whoooooo eee, I am a little bit tired. But happy tired.

Josh came home a bit late (having gone in late) and brought home the most wonderful thing from the farmer's market! Are you ready for it?

Thing I'm thankful for #9: Black Twig apples!!!

When I was growing up, I don't think I even really realized that there were *types* of apples. Well, Red Delicious and Yellow Delicious-- my grandfather was a Red Delicious man and extolled their virtues often while disparaging their yellow counterparts-- and Granny Smith, which I knew from pies. Imagine how my mind was blown when I reached adulthood and started shopping for apples on my own and realized there are about six million different types.

To this day, I mostly cannot keep apple names straight. I like almost all of them. There are some that I think get too mushy too fast, and some that I think just aren't that flavorful or good (aforementioned Delicious apples are in here), but overall, I'm easy to please. Usually I just buy whatever smells good at the apple lady's stand.

But Black Twigs are another story. They are tart... but not too tart. Not super sweet. They're almost cider-y in flavor. And they stay crisp even if you don't eat them for some time. No mushy mealy apple flesh here. I bought one on a whim a couple of years ago because I liked the name (and they smelled good). Changed my apple life. Not only do I know what they're called, I know when they're in season here (usually mid October through Novemberish) and I stalk them. I am SO excited that they are finally here this year!

I did manage to not eat my first one until after dinner. Which was hard, because Josh went to the market today and brought home a ton of them and they were calling my name. Here they are with our other market stuff for today:

We had an incredibly lazy dinner... one of my favorite throw it together quickly things. Roasted root vegetables and tofu. Based loosely off of a recipe in Joanna Vaught's zine Potluck Mania #1. I've made this about three thousand times over the past couple of years... you basically chop up whatever root (or other) vegetables you have on hand, cube your tofu, toss it with some olive oil, salt, pepper, lemon juice, and whatever herbs you have on hand, and roast for an hour. Bam! It's dinner!

Today's version had carrots, parsnip, celery, potatoes, onion, tofu, rosemary, sage, thyme, and parsley in it. Very tasty, I thought. In fact, I am going to go back and eat a second helping of it when I am done typing this because that's just the way I roll.

The Emperor ate some tofu out of his (like 2 cubes) and one small piece each of potato and parsnip, by merit of him thinking they were more tofu. He was really in a crummy mood this evening (after having a great day) so I just didn't push it with him. Not worth the fight.

Here's a picture of him walking in the park this afternoon/evening, before the cranky monster struck:

GF Pumpkin pancakes and seitan breakfast sausages (Thankfulness #8)

2011-11-08T20:54:00.001-08:00

Oh internet... what a day. My workday could be best described as "unrelenting." I came home exhausted from that and set to some leisurely cooking. About 30 minutes into that, I suddenly hear Josh's car in the driveway... turns out he was called to pick the Emperor up at preschool on account of the Emperor having a goopy eye/suspected pinkeye. Doh. So we got him a doctor's appointment this evening at 7p.m. (read: nearly bedtime!) and took him in and had the diagnosis confirmed and got him some eye drops and stopped to get his prescription filled and now we've just gotten home and he's in bed singing to himself and AAAAAH ITS NINE PM WHY AM I AWAKE!!

Aaaanyway...

Thing I'm thankful for #8: I have affordable health insurance. Which means that when my kid brings home the plague from preschool, I can take him to the doctor promptly.

I actually probably wouldn't have taken him in for this if not for the preschool's policy-- you either need to receive treatment for pinkeye or bring in a note from the doctor saying you don't have it. Either way, he needed to go to the doctor before going back to school.

On to dinner: and you will laugh because this is sort of a paradoxical pairing: gluten-free pumpkin pancakes and seitan breakfast sausages!

Both based on recipes in Vegan Diner. The pumpkin pancakes are the pumpkin spice pancakes from the same with a GF baking mix (quinoa flour, white rice flour, almond meal, tapioca flour, flax seeds) subbed in for the wheat flour. The sausages are the breakfast sausages with some fresh herbs (sage, parsley) in instead of dried because that's what I had on hand.

Both very good. I thought this was a good place for the quinoa flour... the heavy spicing and pumpkin flavor in the pancakes hid a lot of the quinoa bitterness. Would definitely make again. The sausages were nice too but not a smash hit with me. I liked the flavor a lot but not the texture so much. Sometimes I really love steamed seitan and sometimes it squicks me out and this was leaning towards a squick.

The Emperor loooooved his pumpkin pancakes. He ate 2 (out of 8) and probably would have eaten more if there'd been more. He wouldn't touch his sausage though he pretended like he was going to and made me cut it up into pieces for him. Then he picked up each piece, showed it to me, and assigned it a size. "Look, mommy! This is a BIG sausage! Mommy look, a little sausage! This piece is TINY!" and on and on. He is a little nut. But I like him.

Grilled Smoky Mountain Cheezes (Thankfulness #7)

2011-11-07T18:19:00.000-08:00

It's Monday... yaaaay. Today I felt kinda uninspired most of the day, and then I saw a thread on the PPK which made it totally clear what today's thankful thing needed to be.

Thing I'm Thankful For #7: my kitchen!

We rent an awesome house. The kitchen sold me on it before anything else. It's really quite a wonderful little place, in a nice neighborhood, right next to a park, etc. But it could have been a total pit and I still would have been like THIS ONE THIS ONE if the kitchen had remained the same.

The main workspace... look at all that counter top!

The stove. On the wall you can see the very tip of my spice iceberg (spiceberg).

Cookbook shelves, kitchen table. The table has a leaf that pulls out, which is good because it's a little awkward to get 3 chairs around it otherwise.

CABINETS! And our rolling dishwasher. And some other stuff.

You see why I love it so much. It's huuuuuuuge. It's bigger than like my last two kitchens put together. Also, so much counter space. Also, so many cabinets! We actually keep books (not cookbooks) in some of the cabinets because there are so freaking many of them. (And we have too many books.) And drawers. And other storage spaces.

Our landlords believe the (newly installed) granite counters are one of the main sells on the kitchen but actually they're just about my least favorite part. They're beautiful, but that's where their awesomeness ends. They look instantly filthy if anything gets on them and you have to be VERY careful with them... can't splash lemon juice on them and not clean it up instantly. And apparently you're really not supposed to put hot pans directly on them either. They're kind of a pain.

Still... a really great kitchen.

What did I make in my really great kitchen tonight? Well, first the fun thing. This was inspired by Cara of Fork and Beans and shows why I leave the fancy stuff to the professionals:

Snack turkey! After taking this picture, I piled up celery with peanut butter and raisins all around it. I had this vague idea that the Emperor might eat the celery if it proved too difficult to extract the peanut butter and raisins from it. This is probably why the dish ants on a log exists... someone else's mom had exactly this same idea. It probably didn't work for her either.

And I did another something I never, ever, EVER do this afternoon: I got home and put my jammies on (normal) and then realized I didn't have an ingredient I needed and (shudder) put my normal clothing back on and went out to the store. I didn't want my family to go hungry, which was obviously the only alternative to making these:

Grilled cheezes made with the Great Smoky Mountain Cheez from Vegan Diner. I didn't have agar or onion powder so had to go out for those things.

The cheeze is really nice. I'd had it before as made by ameyfm, who sold me on this book by merit of the cheezes. But I'm pleased to report that even I could make it without screwing it up. It's quite a gorgeous orange color, and nice and perfectly smooth. The agar gives it a wonderful texture. Cheese-like? I dunno. But good anyway.

I really like it on the sandwiches, more so than most vegan cheeses. It is perhaps a little heavy on the paprika for me. (I know, how is this even POSSIBLE?)

The Emperor ate all but one bite of the (small) sandwich I made for him, which was a surprise. He's often resistant to sandwiches and since this had "sauce" of a sort inside, I was concerned he might not even try them. But he dove right in and loved them. He also licked the peanut butter and raisins off of several pieces of celery and ate about half of the turkey's head. Not a bad dinner for him.

Here he is chomping his sandwich:

Seitan ribz sandwiches (Thankfulness #6)

2011-11-06T18:29:00.000-08:00

It's Sunday and I'm still blogging! What! I had like, the best Sunday ever today, which leads us right into:

Thing I'm thankful for #6: that there are so many small but wonderful pleasures in my life.

Today I: had someone else (Josh) make me breakfast, went to the beach and played in the sand with the Emperor (though we had to leave due to rain, but then we had a great rain walk), went on a lunch date with the Emperor, drank a cup of chai tea while eating a gingersnap and reading a good book for an hour while the Emperor napped, caught a short nap/snuggle with the Emperor at the end of his, got new pajama pants (something I have been putting off for about six months, when my last pair literally fell apart), had a leisurely cooking session followed by delicious dinner, took a nice warm shower with a fancy shampoo bar and nice soap, and am now lolling about in nice soft pajama pants and my bathrobe and blogging.

Any one of these things alone would be delightful. To have a whole day full of such nice things? Ah, bliss. Of course, not every day can be like this. But my life is full of these compact but wonderful events.

Speaking of that delicious dinner: tonight I made the Seitan Ribz (and the accompanying Rough Rider Barbeque Sauce) out of Vegan Diner by Julie Hasson. This is the cookbook for this week's PPK challenge and I have been putting off cooking out of it for the past 2 weeks so I could blog about it this week. And that has been hard, because there are SO many things in here that I want to try!

These ribz? Super easy to make. And yet, super good. They're like the Morningstar Farms veggie riblets except the sauce is better (not as sweet, despite being mainly made out of ketchup) and the texture's better and actually, I just like these a lot more. They make a fabulous sandwich... I actually could not quite finish mine and left some bread uneaten so that I could maximize the amount of ribz/sauce I could ingest without busting a gasket. Oh, we had broccoli on the side, too.

I did eat my broccoli even though it meant not eating some of my bread. Mmm, broccoli.

Here are the ribz pre-saucing:

Will make again. One of the simplest seitan recipes I've ever run across and really quite wonderful.

This was maybe the Emperor's dream dinner. I cut up a couple of ribz for him, and gave him a big serving of broccoli and a small piece of roll with Earth Balance on it. (The past couple of days, he has been obsessed with Earth Balance. He calls it butter and tries to get me to put it on everything.) I think he ate 2 or 3 ribz (out of the 16 the recipe made), his hunk of bread, and 3/4s of the big serving of broccoli. I was surprised he would touch the ribz because, like I"ve mentioned, he's super weird about sauce. But I guess his seitan love overrode that.

I'm sure if I make him this exact dinner again, he will refuse to eat any of it. Oh well.

Here he is looking at the rain during our truncated trip to the beach:

Gingersnaps! (Thankfulness #5)

2011-11-05T18:42:00.000-07:00

It's Saturday and we had a hectic day which included many things but not a nap for the Emperor. So I'm preeeeetty exhausted and this will be brief.

Thing I'm thankful for #5: I'm thankful for this period of the Emperor's life, where he's happy to do pretty much anything that I suggest as long as I'm doing it with him.

Oh, at some point he's going to get over this, I'm sure. Somewhere along the line, he's going to start to feel like anything I want to do is the last thing he'd want to do. He'll think I'm totally uncool (and who could argue?) and that all the stuff I like is lame and etcetera etcetera. We all go through this to some extent at some point in our lives. But... I'm glad he's not there yet and that he's still so open and amicable. This age is a good age.

We had a lengthy trip to the park and when we got home, I had the sudden idea to make cookies. I suggested it to the Emperor and he was absolutely delighted at the thought. He pulled his step stool up to the kitchen counter and I got out the cookbook and ingredients and such. I measured, he poured and stirred. Together, we shaped the dough into balls and squished it down onto the cookie sheet. We both had a great time.

And we made some AWESOME cookies. They're the blackstrap molasses gingersnaps out of Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar.

Admire them:

And the Emperor too:

You may not be able to tell, but he was actually menacing me with that stick. "I poke you with this stick, mommy. I'm poking." (He didn't actually poke me with it though.)

Arabian Lentil & Rice Soup (Thankfulness #4)

2011-11-04T18:32:00.000-07:00

It's Friday! Yay! This has been a long, tedious week at work (have I said that every Friday?) and I'm so ready to be doing something else for a couple of days. I came home this afternoon ready to do something nice and strictly relaxing, to sort of cleanse my mental palate, if you know what I mean. Which segues into!

Thing I'm thankful for #4: I'm thankful that Terry Pratchett is still writing.

I spent a pleasant hour devouring a bit more of his most recent Discworld book, Snuff. I wasn't super excited about an all Sam Vimes all the time (vs a Vimes + Watch) story, but now I'm totally engrossed in it. He manages to do this to me every time. I've been reading his stuff literally since I was a kid-- the Discworld books were some of the earliest books that I borrowed from my Dad. It took me a couple of years to get into them, til I was 11 or 12, probably because my dad was adamant that I should start at the very beginning of the series and the first few are a bit dryer than the rest of the series. But when I got into them, I got into them in a big way and have stuck with them ever since... I've read every one of them. Several of them twice. And I am *not* a re-reader.

Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of early onset Alzheimer's in 2007. He has been frank (to the point of causing quite a bit of controversy in the UK, I gather) about the fact that he's considering assisted suicide rather than letting his condition deteriorate to the point that he's totally non-functional. I find both options heartbreaking-- it will be sad for the world to lose him whenever and however he goes. I'm tearing up a bit writing this. I don't know if he plans on writing another Discworld book after this or not, but I hope he manages to... personally, I'm not ready to let him go.

Phew. I know, I know, this doesn't sound mentally cleansing at all. But the reading definitely is uplifting, even if thinking about Sir Terry's condition isn't.

On to dinner, briefly. It didn't rain much today-- just for the last two minutes of my ride to work, and then for an hour or two afterwards-- but it's quite cold. Acceptable soup weather! So I made the Arabian Lentil & Rice Soup out of Appetite for Reduction, with swiss chard added in as a bonus.

Very tasty. I made this several times when the Emperor was younger but haven't pulled it out in months and months. He used to love it, but I wasn't sure how he'd like it now... turns out he still loves it. He sucked down a ton of it, while verbally admiring it. He made me spoon most of it into his mouth for him though. Finally, after an eternity of feeding him soup, he declared "my tummy is full!" and excused himself from the table, and I actually got to eat my own dinner.

Here he is outside before dinner, with a green tomato that had fallen off of one of our landlords' tomato plants:

Tofu Fun Nuggets & Salad (Thankfulness #3)

2011-11-03T19:12:00.001-07:00

Hey look! It's three days after MoFo and I'm still blogging! Don't get too used to it guys, I could get distracted by anything at any minute. It could happen in the middle of this post!

(Actually, I just got up and went in the other room for like five minutes because I was helping the Emperor with something. I coud have totally forgotten I was writing this in that time but luckily the open laptop sitting on my chair gave me a hint! Annnnyway...)

Thing I'm thankful for #3: rain!

(This is my jack-o-lantern, by the way!)

We had a brief series of rain showers earlier. It's supposed to pick up again tonight and maybe turn into thunderstorms (something I've only seen 3-4 times since I moved to California) but we'll see. Whether or not it rains again today/tomorrow, I'm still happy for a change in the weather. I've always rather liked rain, and even though I'm getting older and I can feel exactly where I've broken several of my toes over the years (the only bones I've ever broken) when it rains, I still love the stuff. The sound of it, the smell of it, the way it makes the pretty flowers grow. Rain is a good thing.

Oh, and I like rainy day food. Soup and casseroles and stuff like that. I thought about making something like that for dinner tonight, but I got kind of summery ingredients at the farmer's market this week, and I had already been thinking of another recipe I wanted to try out, the Tofu Fun Nuggets from Peas and Thank You.

And a big salad to go with it, with the last of my cherry tomatoes from the farmer's market. Oh, it makes me sad to say that... the last of my tomatoes. I should have bought two baskets. They were actually not super expensive this week ($2.50 I think) but no one in the house likes them but me, so I settled on one. Alas.

The nuggets were really good. And very simple to make. Would do again. I didn't have any hummus on hand so I just used some thinned out tahini instead. The salad was great... I put in some cauliflower and zucchini and the tomatoes, and then dressed it with the basic balsamic out of Appetite for Reduction. I'm not a big salad person and so it's always nice when I'm in the mood for it, make it, AND actually enjoy it.

The Emperor loved the nuggets. He ate, get this, EIGHT of them. That's a quarter of the recipe. He ate almost as many nuggets as I did. All while singing a song about tofu. Oh jeez, have I told you about his big thing this week? He sings while he eats. Like while he's chewing. It's maddening... hilarious and yet so weird and kind of gross. I guess that sums up a lot of things about him.

I thought for something fun and slightly different than the daily picture, I would post a little video of him. Here he is "reading" me a book after making me read him eight million other books:

Sorrel pesto and snap peas, again (Thankfulness #2)

2011-11-02T20:05:00.000-07:00

Okay guys, brief post today because I'm feeling a bit worn out. Long day at work + trip the farmer's market + busy evening of playing with the Emperor (who was at one point demanding that I spin him around in the air while tickling him... you tell me why I don't have massive guns yet?) = me very tired. Which segues into:

Thing I'm thankful for #2: living somewhere where produce is cheap, plentiful, and excellent.

Here is my farmer's market haul from today, in two parts:

All I'm saying is: I'm insanely lucky to live somewhere where it's easy and honestly extremely cost effective (if you eat seasonally/don't splurge too much on treat produce) to eat locally grown food. And I know it.

And look what I found today! That fruit that eluded me during MoFo:

A quince!

Isn't that the most adorably ugly fruit you've ever seen? I just want to hug it. Actually, I did hug it, while getting money out of my pocket to pay... and found that it left quince dander all over my shirt. Nice. Teach me to hug fruits.

I wanted something quick for dinner that involved minimal cooking, and I've been thinking about/longing for that sorrel pesto we had during MoFo. (This one.) So I made it again. This time it's even prettier! And just as delicious. Definitely make it with tomatoes unless you're a tomato hater... they really make it pop for me.

The Emperor had a big serving of plain brown rice noodles and a couple of snap peas. He got mad when he finished his plain noodles and asked for more and I explained that the only remaining ones had sauce on them. We need to find a new word to use other than "sauce"-- anything called sauce is his mortal enemy. Weird.

Here he is fresh out of preschool, running around in our driveway with Funny Baby and his water bottle:

Mixed herb falafels (Thankfulness #1)

2011-11-01T18:40:00.000-07:00

Oh, it feels downright spooky to try to write a blog post without a theme, so I thought of a new one! Until Thanksgiving (or until I see something shiny and wander away from blogging), I will open each post with something I am thankful for. Maybe food related. Today's not really food related.

Thing I'm thankful for #1: that I'm still able to be mobile and active and generally pretty healthy at ~30 weeks pregnant.

(Yes, my bathroom mirror needs to be cleaned. I literally cannot reach it at this point.)

I was thinking about this today while I was biking home from work. People (mostly co-workers) have started asking me pretty often if I'm still biking. When anyone hears that I am still biking, the followup question is: when are you going to stop? The answer is: I guess when I have to. One of my only regrets from my pregnancy with the Emperor is that I stopped exercising almost completely at about 32 weeks-- and that is the exact point at which I started to really feel crappy/tired of being pregnant.

Comically, the biggest problem I'm having with biking right now is wind. Like, the wind blowing on me. (Not gas from my innards.) You would think that being larger, wind would bug me less... but maybe I've gotten wider. Like a big sail. So I catch more wind now! I normally bike all the way home in 6th gear with no trouble but today I was stuck in 5th and really pushing it because the wind was against me the whole way.

Speaking of wind: let's eat some beans! Tonight I decided to put together one of my favorite recipes out of one of my favorite cookbooks, Appetite for Reduction. You can tell I've loved the hell out of this cookbook:

In general, the more a cookbook looks like it was hit by a filth comet, the more I like it.

I wanted to make the baked falafel out of AFR tonight. Usually I double the recipe, because I like these as leftovers a lot and they're sooooo freaking easy to make. Things kind of spiraled out of control in my kitchen this afternoon, though, the way that they often will. First I accidentally opened one can of chickpeas and one can of white beans instead of 2 chickpeas. Okay, no big deal. Just mash them together. Oh hey, I don't have any parsley in the fridge... cilantro? Nope, out of that too. Rosemary and sage and thyme? YES! So I just chopped those up and put in like a cup and a half instead of the 1c of parsley. Then I swapped out the hot sauce (out of it) and put in soy sauce for moisture instead. Garlic powder instead of minced garlic. You see what I mean? These are barely the same falafels that are in the book.

Still yummy, though. We had them with chopped vegetables (carrots, zucchini, and cauliflower) and leftover baba ganoush. The Emperor ate exactly one. He was dismayed to find a whole chickpea in it: "I don't LIKE chickpeas. I don't want this chickpea. I want mommy to take the chickpea out." I rolled my eyes and pulled the chickpea out for him, after which he ate the whole thing and said he liked it. Joke's on you kid, the whole thing is made out of chickpeas.

He also ate some vegetables, a little of this and a little of that. 3 or 4 sticks of zucchini, all while telling us, "I don't like zucchini. I'm not going to eat it. I don't like it." WHILE HE WAS CHEWING IT. He is kind of a nut sometimes.

Speaking of which, he took today's bonus picture:

Vegan MoFo: Seriously, chik'n nuggets & fries (Laziness #5)

2011-10-31T20:17:00.000-07:00

Okay, okay, first dinner. Let's just get it over with people. I had meant to put something in the crockpot this morning since I knew we weren't doing anything tonight, but it didn't happen. I went straight from work to taking the Emperor out trick-or-treating downtown to coming home starving and so after discussing our options (there's plenty of good food in the house, but most of it involves like, peeling and stuff), Josh trekked out to the grocery store to find us something really lazy for dinner. Which is how we ended up with this:

Mmmm, beige food.Oh well, it was food. Look! We ate food (for some values of food) 31 days in a row and now my MoFo blog will stand forever as proof of this!

Thanks again to everyone who read along and commented this year. I had so much fun. Maybe you've seen in comments, but in case you didn't... I'm going to *try* to blog a bit more in the eleven months between now and next MoFo. Not making any promises, but we'll see. It really was a blast this year.

What else was a blast: doing Halloween stuff with the Emperor. For my last MoFo post, you are going to get BONUS bonus pictures. (Some of them have food in them. It's on topic.)

Emperor in his pirate costume. This is after he spent all day at preschool in the costume-- we were amazed by how un-terrible his white shirt was at the end of the day though Josh was still referring to him as Filthy the Filth Pirate.

Here he is telling me we need to go back out trick-or-treating. Me: "I think we're going to stay in the house and hand out treats now." Him: "I think" (cocks head to side) "we go more trick-or-treat? Do more trick-or-treat? I think so."

He only actually got about seven pieces of candy (and one cool eraser shaped like an ambulance) during downtown trick-or-treating. Seven pieces... probably plenty for him. I had him pick one piece to eat right away and he chose this lollipop. I read somewhere that these are accidentally vegan, just going to show once again that vegan doesn't necessarily equal healthy. Though in this case, it does equal adorable.

Speaking of vegan, we handed out little bags of pretzels as our treat. I was a little worried we'd end up hearing a lot of kids whining about this but no one seemed upset about it and we gave out every last baggy. We had 94 trick-or-treaters by the time we ran out-- at 7 p.m. We really only had our light on about an hour. That's nuts.

The Emperor was falling over tired by the end of the night. I feel him... what a long (but fun! but LONG!) day. Here's a picture of him (in his second costume, pajamas) looking about how I feel at this point.

Vegan MoFo: Baba ganoush, flat breads & friends (Laziness #4)

2011-10-30T19:23:00.000-07:00

First things first, people: tomorrow is Halloween. And people with kids in (pre)school know what this means: sending in a treat to your kid's class. I wanted to make cake pops like the awesome ones on Hot Vegan Chickpeas that were at a recent bake sale in SC. But I wasn't sure if most other parents let their 2 year olds eat chocolate (even at Halloween) and also I couldn't find sticks, so instead I went with my backup idea instead:

Little rice krispie treat pumpkins made with Dandies. Mmm, Dandies. It's hard to tell the scale from the picture, but these are very small... between a marble and a golf ball. I figure they're about the right size for little people to eat them, and I made enough for each kid (and the teachers) to have 2. I'm not 100% in love with how they turned out but the Emperor flipped when he saw them and was like PUMPKINS PUMPKINS I WANT TO EAT THOSE PUMPKINS so they seem to be age appropriate.

Now on to actual food: so what is the laziest possible thing a person can eat? A meal someone else cooked. I consider the ultimate in lazy food to be food that Josh makes me. It really ought to be equivalent to takeout but... somehow it's better if it's him, and if I don't even have to go so far as to pick out what I want to eat off of a menu, ha ha. We got some lovely eggplants at the farmer's market on Wednesday, and Josh proposed making baba ganoush with them. Then he went one step further and made his own flatbreads.

Mmm, flat breads. These are a combo of mostly whole wheat flour with some bread flour mixed in, and a combo of herbs including rosemary, cumin, and fennel. Sounds weird, but it works, it really works.

And here's the rest of our dinner spread. Baba ganoush, some za'atar, carrot sticks and chopped cauliflower (cut off in the picture), and some locally made dolmas.

The Emperor ate some carrots while we were making the rest of dinner and then gorged himself silly on flat bread. He tried cauliflower ("dis is white broccoli?") but gave it back to me. Wouldn't try anything else on the table but oh well. He had carrots and bread, that's not so bad.

He painted a pumpkin this morning, by the way. (He's not quite at the carving level yet. He can't even use scissors yet.) Here is a picture of him when he got past the painting on the pumpkin part and well into the painting on himself part.

Vegan MoFo: (vegan) Bacon'n'egg burgers (Laziness #3)

2011-10-29T19:26:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wonder if I tracked the quality of my days on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being a really crummy day (yesterday was a 3 or a 4) and 10 being a really great day, what the average would be. I guess this is a nerdy thing to think about, but I really love quantifying things like that and playing with statistics. Anyway, today was so good, so freakin' close to perfect, that I think it must've bumped up my average for the past week quite a bit.

This morning, the Emperor and I walked to our favorite local grocery store (Staff of Life... my favorite by merit of having the best bulk bins, which I am crazy for), which is about 2 miles away from our house. We started out both walking, and I figured he would make me pick him up two blocks later and I'd carry him on my back in the Ergo... this is how it always goes. But no, he actually walked the entire way today. Well, he meandered the entire way. It did take us an entire hour to get there. Once there, we split a gigantic vegan chocolate chip cookie and a soy latte. (Okay, I didn't share my latte.) Here he is with the cookie:

I felt kinda like a super bad parent letting him have a cookie in the morning when I knew we were going to a party in the afternoon and he'd have more treats there. But, eh. Every now and again we go on these little coffee dates together, and they make me so ridiculously happy. He's not going to develop diabetes from having cookies twice in one day occasionally. Anyway, I mitigated the damage to him by forcing him to give me about half of the cookie, ha ha.

After our coffee date, we went grocery shopping, then I did carry him on my back on the way home. (He fell asleep. Envy!) Later we went to another toddler friend's birthday party, which was a ton of fun. His parents are so sweet and thoughtful... in the midst of all their party planning, they made sure to find some great vegan options (including sweet treats at cake time!!) even though we were the only vegans at the party. I'm really touched by that.

And they ALSO had a huge dressup box out for the party, as the little friend's birthday is on Halloween. The Emperor was not in to most of the costumes, hats, and wigs. But he WAS really into... get this... a big, sweeping imperial robe. Which I swear, he picked out himself. Here it is:

He was very careful not to step on the hem of it and walked in a very slow, stately fashion wearing it. This pretty much made my life.

We stayed at the party and played basically until he was falling over from tiredness. Then we came home and I put together a pretty quick dinner. I wanted to make another burger out of Best Veggie Burgers on the Planet and have been considering the Bacon and Eggs Burgers since someone else posted about them in the PPK Challenge thread. I tweaked the recipe a little bit on her suggestions-- added some nutritional yeast, a bit of black salt, and somewhat more vegan baco bits, and some water to make it all stick together after those additions.

Doesn't really look like much, but they were quite good. We had them with a copious side of snap peas... I was going to make some sort of potato something for maximum diner-i-ness, but I'm glad I didn't. We would not have had room. As is, we only made it through about 2.5 burgers between the three of us.

The Emperor ate a TON of snap peas, before, during, and after the cooking process. He probably ate about a third cup raw, a third cup partially cooked, and a third cup cooked. Maybe more, I don't know. He also ate close to an entire half of a burger. This is the third or fourth time now that he's had snap peas and been really enamored of them... I'm delighted and hope it sticks. Today he told me he likes them because "I like to go CRUNCH CRUNCH! I want to CRUNCH CRUNCH snap peas!" And here he is crunch crunching:

Vegan MoFo: Bean & Rice Burritos (Laziness #2)

2011-10-28T19:59:00.000-07:00

Okay, so look. I was going to cook something tonight. Really, I was. I was going to make chickpea nugglets, which are what you get if you take the chickpea cutlet dough from Veganomicon and shape them into nuggets instead of cutlets and then roll them in bread crumbs and bake them. That plus some swiss chard plus oh I don't know what else I was thinking of. It all seems so long ago now!

I got home with this plan in mind and discovered... that I had locked myself out. I was about an hour and a half later getting home than I usually am because I dragged my aching body (not been a great week for me physically) all around town running some mostly fruitless errands before heading home. But getting home an hour and a half early meant I was still home over an hour before Josh usually gets home. So I had two options: wait in the back yard, with nothing to do except think about how hungry/thirsty/tired/in need of a bathroom I was, ooooor get back up and walk back downtown.

At the end of the day, I'll almost always choose action over inaction (because I hate boredom more than I love laziness) so I got up and walked back downtown. So when I got there I was basically like I NEED FOOD OR I AM GOING TO COMBUST and J suggested we could go pick up the boy from preschool and then go get takeout.

Which is exactly what we did. We stopped at Planet Fresh Burrito in Santa Cruz, which is a place that I kind of really love. You can get a big vegan burrito for about $5... your choice of beans and rice and tortilla. (I always get black beans, brown rice, and whole wheat tortilla, personally.) And a side of house-made fresh tortilla chips. The best part? By default, there's no cheese or sour cream or anything on the burritos, so you don't have to spend five minutes telling the guys hold this, hold that. They have a couple of tasty vegan add-ons... guacamole and smoked tofu are the two that most often end up in my burrito. Oh, and they make their own fresh salsas... like six different flavors... which are self-serve, all you can guzzle from their salsa bar. I have a serious weakness for their smoky chipotle salsa and like to just drink it out of a little cup (really) while I eat my burrito.

I've been wanting one of their burritos for MONTHS but I only ever think of them on weekdays when I'm at work and can't easily bike down and get one on my lunch break. So it was nice to enjoy that treat that I had so pined for.

The Emperor used to love these burritos when he was first getting into solid foods ("black bean" and "tortilla" were two of his earliest words) but then he went through a phase where he absolutely wouldn't touch them. He was really in to talking about the burritos ahead of time tonight, and was telling me, "I want to eat a burrito. I want a burrito on my plate. I want Grey to eat a burrito. I want to eat a burrito with black beans, brown rice, and tortilla. And salsa. On my plate." He was really articulate about it. And you know? When I actually put burrito on his plate after all this talk? He ACTUALLY ATE everything except the salsa. Black beans, brown rice, and tortilla! And some shredded lettuce. Amazing.

Here he is in the car while we waited for Josh to get the burritos from the restaurant. He was insistent that we were going to go eat in the restaurant and I was insistent that we were going home to eat. He's making a good "whatever mom" face here.

Vegan MoFo: Tortilla chips & cheezy salsa sauce (Laziness #1)

2011-10-27T20:17:00.000-07:00

Hi again! Like I said yesterday, I am still MoFoing these last few days even though the alphabet is over. I have to tell you that in my normal life, I usually make dinner about 5 days a week... then usually we eat out for a late lunch/early dinner on a weekend day and Josh makes something the other day or we eat whatever's lying around that requires very little effort. So cooking something requiring thought for 26 days in a row was a little intense for me.

So laziness dinner #1 is a really, really, really lazy dinner. Cut me a little slack guys, I needed a break.

Here's what I did, on a tip I picked up on the PPK or somewhere else on the internet:

Take a container of Wayfare Foods Cheddar Spread, put it in a bowl. Mix it with slightly less salsa of your choosing. (Ours is a local brand which we first sampled from the hands of Mrs. A. herself. Sweet older ladies are always selling us stuff at the grocery store. It's a problem!) Not too much salsa, or it will get watery, which will defeat the point of even including the Wayfare stuff (which is mostly for texture). Mix together!

Eat with tortilla chips or, if you're less lazy than us, maybe some cut up veggies. (I was going to have celery but we're out of it. Out of celery! Yes really! And I could not bring myself to peel a carrot.)

It is not the most beautiful looking food but there's some appeal in that this looks so gross, it's got to be good kinda way:

Josh and I were both happy to eat it. The Emperor wouldn't touch it. He had a Smart Dog instead (which he would live off if we let him, which we don't) and some plain tortilla chips instead. By merit of eating some protein, I think he had a healthier dinner than us.

Before dinner but after preschool, we went out to the local pumpkin patch to get some pumpkins. The Emperor had a blast wandering around and (eventually) making us pull him around in a pumpkin wagon. He became bizarrely attached to this little white gourd from about the moment we got there, and we're such suckers for a cute kid with a gourd that we let him bring it home... where he attempted to smuggle it into bed with him. No bed gourd, kid. Not til you sleep in your own bed anyway.

Vegan MoFo: Where we've been, N through Z

2011-10-27T06:44:00.000-07:00

We made it! Through the entire alphabet! I made a plan and stuck to it for TWENTY SIX DAYS IN A ROW people! For me and my kitchen, this is big. I did a roundup post of A-M already, and you can also see the entire A through Z as a nice orderly Flickr set. (Or see all of the daily Emperor pictures from this MoFo.)

For the purpose of not cluttering up the MoFo feed too much, I'm just going to recap the second half of the alphabet here:

N is for Nutmeg - Waffles with Orange Nutmeg Tapioca

O is for Olive - Mixed Olive Walnut Spread

P is for Port - Mushroom & Port Tart

Q is for Quince - Quince Glazed Black Bean Cutlets

R is for Rosemary - Rosemary Apple Potato Rosti

S is for Sorrel - Pesto & Peas (Sorrel & Snaps)

T is for Turmeric - Laksa with Fresh Turmeric Pickle

U is for Umeboshi - Simple Onigiri

V is for Vanilla - Vanilla Bean Pudding

W is for Wine - Sunday Seitan Roast with Red Wine

X is for Xanthan - Gluten-free French Four Spice Shortbreads

Y is for Yam - Sweet Potato Chipotle Burgers

Z is for Za'atar - Za'atar Crusted Polenta

Some statistics for the second half of the alphabet:
Favorite ~~meal~~ series of meals from the second half: Q-R-S-T was just a really great streak... I loved the quince glazed cutlets (a really good leftover), loved the rosti (especially as a leftover), was surprised by how much I loved the sorrel pesto (also a great leftover), and totally adored the laksa with turmeric pickle (amazing leftover). I can't pick a single favorite.
Least favorite meal of the second half: The only thing I didn't really like was the orange nutmeg tapioca with waffles... I liked the components but it was a weird dinner.
Number of ingredients I had never cooked with before this month (total): 12 (xanthan, umeboshi, fresh turmeric, quince, sorrel, longan, jaggery, kimchi, icewine, fresh horseradish, farro, bourbon) - almost half of my MoFos!
Number of ingredients I had flat out never eaten before this month: 6 (fresh turmeric, sorrel, quince (? not sure), longan, fresh horseradish, farro) - about 1/4 of my MoFos!
Worst chalkboard picture (second half) - port or wine. The port one just looks grimy and the wine one, "vanilla" isn't erased well enough and you can still see it written... upside down.
Best chalkboard picture (second half) - two way tie, sorrel & rosemary.
Number of pictures taken for MoFo, mostly trying to get 26 passable shots of the Emperor not including ones so bad I deleted them instantly: 1308

And last but not least (to me, anyway), best picture of the Emperor that didn't make it into the daily MoFo shots by merit of being taken too late in the day!

That's it! Thank you guys so much for all the love and feedback-- it really made my MoFo this year extra fun and extra special.

Vegan MoFo: Za'atar Crusted Polenta (Z is for Za'atar)

2011-10-26T18:23:00.000-07:00

Aieeeee! It's Z! Z snuck up on me!

Most of the alphabet I decided on as I went along. A couple of these, I didn't know what I was going to do for that letter until uh, the day of. I am not a great plan-ahead-er when it comes to cooking. (I am a big planner in my non-cooking life, so maybe that's why. Balance, people.) But I knew what I would do from day one: za'atar!

What is za'atar? I thought I was cheating by using it initially, since I thought it meant a particular spice blend. But za'atar (or za'tar or zatar or however you want to spell it) actually refers to any herb in the same family as wild thyme: thyme, marjoram, oregano, savory, and maybe a few more. Za'atar the spice blend is usually some combination of these (thyme being most common) plus toasted sesame seeds plus salt plus ground sumac. I had a little bit of a pre-made mix that was thyme/sesame/salt/sumac and nothing else, and then I bumped it up with additional thyme, marjoram, oregano, sesame seeds, and salt. Basically extra everything except sumac (which I don't have, sadly).

One of the most common things to do with za'atar is to mix it with oil and slather it on things. Usually flatbread but sometimes also vegetables and such. I had this urge to put it on polenta. Why polenta? I don't know, but isn't polenta good? When I first went vegan, I used to always broil it and put tomato sauce on it and just eat it like that, and it was so good, so crusty and crispy on the outside and soft and pillowy on the inside. So I thought, I'll slather the outside of it with za'atar and then broil it.

You can see from the picture above that the polenta ended up in a frying pan instead. Broiling probably would have worked, except I always used to broil polenta... in the toaster oven... on a rimmed baking sheet. Which I forgot until the polenta slices on my non-rimmed half-sheet in the normal oven (our toaster oven died, alas, alas) SLID OFF THE SHEET. After I recovered from it, I laughed so hard, because really, it was like a bad comedy sketch, all these beautiful pieces of polenta sliding towards the oven floor and me catching them on the end of my spatula and flipping them back as fast as I could.

Anyway, I finished them in the pan instead and they weren't quite how I wanted them (more greasy than intended) but still quite good. We ate them on top of chickpeas & chard cooked in tomato sauce, which I think was an idea beamed into my head by reading a post on One Arab Vegan. Or someone else in MoFo. I definitely stole that from someone.

It was really good but, alas, I have terrible heartburn again today and fried things on top of tomato sauce is basically the worst thing I could possibly pick to eat in this situation. I got through three small slices of polenta and about a third cup of chickpeas/greens/sauce.

The Emperor actually ate his polenta of his own volition and said he really liked it. He would not, however, touch the chickpeas. Not surprising-- he has a very negative stance regarding tomato sauce on things. (Or any sauce on anything.)

Oh hey! It was our last farmer's market of MoFo 2011. (Aw, that's sad.) Want to see my loot? Here it is:

About the last couple of days of MoFo: don't worry, I'll be here! I think my theme for the remaining 5 days will be easy dinners. (Josh joked that we should just have takeout for the rest of the month to make up for all the cooking.) And of course, there will be a wrap up. And Emperor pictures.

Speaking of which, the first time I tried photographing him tonight, he told me very pointedly, "I don't want Mommy to take pictures of me." Well, excuse me. Later I got him wearing my bike helmet:

Vegan MoFo: Sweet Potato-Chipotle Burgers (Y is for Yam)

2011-10-25T18:50:00.001-07:00

Just a brief post today. There are all sorts of fascinating things one could do for the letter Y-- yuzu, for instance, which I'd really like to find and cook with-- but I had some garnet yams left from a week or two ago that have been sitting around just waiting for eating.

Y is for YUM! Y is for YAM!

Something I have realized over the course of this MoFo is that I have a serious thing for orange foods. Pumpkin, squash, oranges, carrots, even orange bell pepper. Like 75% of the things I've pinned on pinterest have orange somewhere in them. If it's orange, my eyes tell my brain THAT IS DELICIOUS, EAT IT. And it's always right! Orange things just taste good. I wonder why that is?

I decided to use my beautiful orange garnet yams (which, by the way, are actually a sweet potato; but you never see them labeled as sweet potatoes around here so just roll with it!) to make the Chipotle Sweet Potato Burgers from Best Veggie Burgers on the Planet which is this week's book for the PPK Cookbook Challenge.

Here are the completed burgers with some tots:

Here's a view of the patties just out of the oven. You can see they actually turned more red than orange, probably because of the entire can of chipotles in the recipe, heh. But hey, I'll take it. There are still a couple of nice orange chunks in there.

They were really tasty, but spicy. I've had horrible heartburn all day for no clear reason, and I was pretty worried about eating an entire one of these after the first bite. (Has not yet made my heartburn come back but check with me in a while.) They'd be great with something like vegenaise (which we're out of) or maybe the cool slaw out of AFR? They're quite yummy just on buns with lettuce & ketchup & mustard though.

The Emperor wouldn't touch them. He kind of sniffed at the piece of burger I cut off for him and then told me it was "really hot" without tasting or touching it. Quite insistent about this. I dunno, I guess they smell spicy. He did eat some tater tots and some lettuce though, so, take what you can get I guess.

After dinner we went out for a walk. Ah, I love fall so much, and tonight was about as good as a fall night gets in California... crisp and cool and lovely. The Emperor liked looking at the couple of houses that have pumpkins and other Halloween decorations out in our neighborhood. But what he REALLY liked was this leaf:

He told us repeatedly that it was "his favorite". Can't recall him ever using that word before.

Link love pt 2

2011-10-25T09:37:00.000-07:00

So a couple of weeks ago, two people simultaneously mentioned me in their Liebster roundup and I did one of my own. Since then, a bunch more lovely people have come out of the woodwork and mentioned me on THEIR lists. While I don't have the mental stamina today to make up another list of my own MoFo favorites, I did want to publicly acknowledge and thank the people who mentioned me! Because it really does warm my heart. Blogging is always nicer when at least one person out there tells you they're interested in what you're saying!

So thank you for the Liebster mentions from the following nice internet people:

allularpunk from Awesome. Vegan. RAD. - Go for the pictures! Stay because you can't be seen around town drooling like that.

Laura from Retro Vegan - makes the food I would like someone to make me when I'm sick, or really any time.

Richa from Hobby & More - another blogger with amazing food pictures. Innovative sweets (candied lime cookies!) and tasty Indian dishes too... yes please.

Jess from Cupcakes & Kale - does what it says on the tin! Go to see the salted caramel apple cupcakes (no, you didn't just dream that, they're real) and stay for the KALE.

I-don't-know-her-name-but-her-food-looks-amazing from Food Stains - her MoFo's been like peering through the window of the 24hr diner of your dreams.

I think that's everyone! (And nicely, this comes out to another five people... so I guess I did do another list of five, heh.) Thanks again for all the love!

Vegan MoFo: Gluten-free French four spice shortbreads (X is for Xanthan)

2011-10-24T18:13:00.001-07:00

Dear internet, if you ever wondered how much I love you... I stayed home sick today but still pushed to make something for MoFo. Don't worry, I'm not that sick, and it wasn't that much work.

The hardest part of X was coming up with an idea. Which was, if you'll eXcuse me, eXtremely difficult. The only two ingredients I could think of for x were xanthan gum and xylitol. Neither of them are really foods, are they? More like food additives. I've never worked with either before and just wasn't dying to either. Xanthan gum seemed like it might be a useful tool to have in my repetoire, as I've heard it can be really handy in GF baking and I always like to know more ways to make baked goods available to everyone. Xylitol? Doesn't have too much going for it that I can tell. So I went with xanthan.

Wow, xanthan gum is EXPENSIVE. Muy expensivo! I forget the exact amount per oz but it was high, even from the bulk bins. i didn't realize how little of it I needed so I bought like a 1/4c, which ended up running me something like $3. Ouch.

I decided to make a variation on the Chai Spice Shortbread in Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, as I've wanted to try those and also I already had the stuff on hand to make Terry & Isa's GF baking mix. I've used their baking mix with okay results before, some crumbling and such. Since there are 2 cups of flour in the mix, I added a total of 1 tsp of xanthan to the recipe. I had no idea when/where I was supposed to add the xanthan, so I put 3/4 tsps into the dry flour mix and 1/4 tsp into the shortening/sugar mix. Other than that (and using GF flour mix for the 1 c AP flour/1c ww flour), I replaced all the spices in the recipe with about 4 tsps quatre epices, which is a spice mixture I love.

Here are the cookies post-baking:

They turned out pretty well. They have a sort of crispiness and lightness to them... yet they're not crumbly at all. I must not have gone overboard on the xanthan because they're neither gummy nor heavy. Cool. They're definitely better than my previous gluten free cookies have been. Pretty tasty.

I think I've decided that I hate quinoa flour, though. It tastes... so... quinoa-y. To my mouth, it overwhelms basically every other flavor. I love quinoa, don't get me wrong, but I want my cookies to taste like cookies, not like quinoa. Maybe someday if I make it through my entire bag of quinoa flour, I'll try millet flour.

I was curious as to how xanthan would change a recipe I was familiar with, so I also tried adding about 1/4 tsp to the Melty White Cheez from the Ultimate Uncheez Cookbook, which I like as a super easy weeknight mac'n'cheez sauce. It had a definitely effect-- the sauce ended up much stretchier. It formed visible strands when I was mixing it together with the noodles. It actually kinda reminded me of mac made with Daiya. Not quite the same, but heading that direction. Cool!

The Emperor loves the cookies. He won't touch the mac'n'cheez. (Not surprising. He won't eat noodles with any kind of sauce on them lately. This kid.) Here's a picture of him enjoying one of the cookies in our extremely poorly lit living room:

Vegan MoFo: Sunday Seitan Roast with Red Wine (W is for Wine)

2011-10-23T18:28:00.001-07:00

So the good news is, the Emperor is feeling mostly recovered. (Still running a fever off and on, but much lower, and his mood is much improved.) The bad news is that it looks like I'm next in line, and have also been doing the on again off again fever thing. I felt okayish this morning and luckily I started dinner then, or MoFo might not have happened tonight!

And that would be too sad, because this is our fourth and final boozy Sunday, when we visit one of my favorite things to just throw into things I'm cooking: wine!

As you may know if you've been reading along this month, I have fallen desperately in love with the Savory Seitan from American Vegan Kitchen. Really, I think that recipe alone is worth the price of the cookbook (and there are so many other tasty things in there too!), or at least it has been for me. I've made it something like four times this month, doing the frying/oven braising cutlet method every time. This time I decided to try the crockpot method instead and while I was already pulling out the crockpot... why not throw some vegetables in there?

Sunday seitan roast with red wine
1/2 recipe of American Vegan Kitchen's Savory Seitan, shaped into two separate roasts -- or your favorite seitan roast, uncooked
1 bottle red wine (we really used about 3/4s of an old bottle of not great wine, and a 1/4 bottle of a new okay bottle)
1 large parsnip, cubed
5 stalks of celery, chopped
1 large onion, peeled & quartered
6 small potatoes, halved
fresh or dried herbs of your choosing: I used leftover fresh rosemary and about 2 tsps each dried oregano and thyme
4 small dried shiitake mushrooms
2-4c additional veggie broth

Optional gravy:
1 tbsp EB
2 tbsps cornstarch
1/4c water

1. Put all of the ingredients in the first list except broth (seitan, wine, parsnip, celery, onion, potatoes, herbs, mushrooms) in a 5 qt crock pot.
2. Add veggie broth until everything is covered. I needed a little more than 2 c of broth.
3. Cook on low for 8 hours.

4. To make gravy: remove 2c of cooking liquid once the roast is cooked and put it in a small sauce pan.
5. Add the earth balance.
6. Heat over medium heat.
7. While heating, whisk cornstarch into water.
8. Then whisk slurry into mixture in saucepan.
9. Bring to a boil and let boil for at least 1 minute to thicken/cook cornstarch.

I sliced the roast and put a bit of gravy on it, then served the cooked vegetables alongside it and a couple of pieces of EB'd bread.

Josh and I thought it was really yummy. The seitan somehow manages to be simultaneously soft and yet not mushy, the way that undercooked seitan sometimes turns out. The gravy's a nice addition too, but what's not better with gravy? I would have really liked a green vegetable alongside this but really people, I'm in no condition to even pull a bag of broccoli out of the freezer.

The Emperor was anti-seitan today for whatever reason. He just ate his bread. Oh well.

Earlier a firetruck got stuck outside of our house. Here is the Emperor looking VERY concerned about the situation:

Until tomorrow!

Vegan MoFo: Vanilla Bean Pudding (V is for Vanilla)

2011-10-22T19:22:00.000-07:00

Today turned out to be a little bit of a day, people. The Emperor is still feeling quite poorly, though we have no idea what's wrong with him. He has a fever and is obviously totally off personalitywise and is breathing extra quickly and audibly, but other than that, no symptoms that we can ascertain. He is DELIGHTING in having his ear temperature taken... we have now taken it approximately seven thousand times in the past 24 hours, because he keeps asking us to do it again... so I don't think it's an ear infection. Who knows. He probably caught the plague at preschool or something.

Anyway, I'd been planning on today being a fairly lazy day MoFo-wise anyhow but it ended up being even lazier than I expected. There are only two options I could think of for V that were within my laziness perimeters: vinegar and vanilla. Vinegar has so many interesting possibilities, buuuut I couldn't think of any that didn't also require uh, work on my part. So instead, the vanilla.

Originally we were planning on attending the baby shower of two of our local friends, and I was going to make a total vanilla delight to take that: shortbread crust, then a layer of vanilla mousse, then a thin layer of strawberry jam, then a layer of strawberries. Jeez, doesn't that sound good?! It sounds good to me! But... throughout the night and into the early morning, it became clear that the Emperor was just not going to be better for today and I decided that I really ought to stay home with him. So, no party, no pie. :(

On the upside, we got to spend a lot of time snuggling together, reading books in bed and just talking about random things. So that was pretty good too. Then we fell asleep together at nap time, and I proceeded to sleep for three and a half hours. You can tell he's sick because he didn't stand next to the bed going MOMMY GET UP over and over and over.

I needed to pull something vanilla-y together quickly, so I decided to try... vanilla pudding!

Vanilla Bean Pudding
4 generous servings

2c + 1/2c unsweetened soy milk
1/2c sugar
1 vanilla bean
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
3 tbsps corn starch

1. Whisk 2c of the soy milk and the sugar in a small saucepan over medium heat.
2. Slice the vanilla bean down the center and use the point of a knife to scrape the bean bits into the soy milk/sugar mixture. When scraped clean, also put the pod in the sauce pans. (I think this makes it taste better but maybe I'm nuts.)
3. Add the vanilla extra and whisk again.
4. In measuring cup or small bowl, whisk together the remaining 1/2c of soy milk and the 3 tbsps of corn starch. You want it to be nice and smooth and absolutely lump free before you add it to the main pudding pot.
5. Whisk soy-corn starch mixture into the saucepan with the other ingredients.
6. Allow mixture to reach a boil, whisking often.
7. Once it reaches a boil, let it boil for a minute without stirring.
8. Remove from heat, whisk again, remove vanilla pods and pour out into small serving dishes.
9. Put pudding in the fridge for at least an hour to cool/thicken.

One thing I've wanted as a vegan is a simple vanilla bean ice cream that just tastes like plain old vanilla bean ice cream. I've tried just about every one I've come across and none of them have quite the right flavor (or the little bits). So I'm surprised and delighted to report that this pudding captures that flavor (though obviously not the texture... it's pudding!) pretty perfectly for me.

So while not quite as fancy or interesting as what we had planned, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out.

I expect the Emperor will be when he tries it, too... but he's fallen asleep on the couch next to me so he might not have any until tomorrow. Here's a picture of him from dinner time... I think you can see how bad he feels in it. (And we feel so bad about him feeling so bad that I'm letting him do something that I'm always scolding him for, fishing in his water glass for the ice cubes he demanded we put in.)

Vegan MoFo: Simple Onigiri (U is for Umeboshi)

2011-10-21T18:49:00.000-07:00

Brief post today. The Emperor came home from preschool this evening with a fever-- one thermometer said about 100 degrees, the other said about 102. From feeling him, I'm leaning more towards the 102. :/ He's all out of sorts, all slow and groggy and a little whinier than usual and just obviously not feeling right. Poor guy.

I'm not feeling great today either, though my bad feeling more comes down to stress and just having a crummy couple of days. (I also felt fevery for a few hours earlier at work, but that's over now.) I decided to do something really, really simple and traditional with today's ingredient: umeboshi!

Umeboshi are salty pickled plums from Japan. I l-o-v-e them and will eat them straight up, but understand I am in the minority here. Probably the most common thing to do with them is to stick them inside of onigiri, or rice balls. And that is exactly what I decided to do today.

Ingredients-wise, onigiri is the simplest thing in the whole world. It's rice with stuff inside, in this case umeboshi. It can be a little tricky to make, and I've tried before with mixed success... but I found a really good guide today and had good results.

Here's the completed onigiri:

And a picture of the process-- there's the rice on the plastic wrap with the umeboshi in the middle, before the shaping:

I always wonder if the umeboshi in the white rice is supposed to look like a Japanese flag or not. That's what it always makes me think of.

The Emperor ate a ton of white rice but was extremely, extremely displeased when he tasted the umeboshi. He kept telling me, "I can taste salty. I can taste salty. No salty. NO SALTY. I don't want to taste salty!" Here he is eating the non-salty bits of his rice ball though:

Something more exciting tomorrow I hope...

Vegan MoFo: Laksa with Fresh Turmeric Pickle (T is for Turmeric)

2011-10-20T19:18:00.000-07:00

Ever have one of those days where so many annoying/frustrating/upsetting things happen that they start snowballing and suddenly things that aren't a big deal seem like they are? Where so many crummy things have happened that when you go to the grocery store and you can't find fresh lemongrass all you want to do is shout WHY UNIVERSE, WHY DO YOU SO HATE ME?! Yeah, today was one of those.

On days like this, I fear going into the kitchen. Because if something goes wrong, I will have a total meltdown and I know it. And as you can probably guess, in my crazy chaotic kitchen, things go wrong all the time! Usually I embrace this as part of the fun and challenge of cooking and roll with it, but today I was in no mood. I actually seriously thought about just getting takeout today and topping it with the one item I had pre-made for today. (Actually, it's the one thing I have managed to make ahead during this entire month!) Buuuut... the lure of the unknown was too great. You see, today I was cooking with fresh turmeric!

We saw someone use fresh turmeric on Top Chef: Just Desserts a while ago, prior to which I had no idea what turmeric looked like when it wasn't in powdered and in a baggie form. So imagine my delight when we were at an Indian grocery store looking for jaggery back at the letter J and I actually SAW some fresh turmeric in a produce case! I immediately bought a couple little rhizomes (like ginger, they're not exactly roots) and stashed them away for the letter T!

I'm so glad I decided to cook tonight after all, because it turns out I freaking love what I made, laksa... a type of asian curry-like soup. Cooking went so smoothly and I really loved the end result. So I am sharing the recipe, which is my own interpretation based on what I had on hand after reading about six thousand non-vegan laksa recipes earlier today.

Laska with Fresh Turmeric Pickle
makes a ton of soup - serves 8?

Turmeric pickle:
large piece (2 inches or so) fresh turmeric
juice of 4 limes

Laksa paste:
1 tbsp chopped jarred lemongrass
1 tbsp pureed jarred galangal
1 inch piece of ginger root, peeled & grated
2 inch piece of turmeric, peeled & grated
6 whole brazil nuts
3 shallots, peeled and sliced
3 cloves garlic, peeled
4 green chiles (or more, if you like it spicy... I wanted it a bit less mild), seeded and sliced
4 tbsp coconut oil, NOT chilled
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar

Rest of soup base:
1 can coconut milk
4c vegetable broth

Mix-ins:
1 lb tofu, cubed
1/2 lb rice noodles of your choosing
2c chopped snap peas
1 small tomato chopped
1 bunch of kale, finely chopped
1 tsp chopped jarred lemongrass
1 tsp jarred pureed galangal

1. One day before you want to make laksa, make the turmeric pickle: use a vegetable peeler to peel the turmeric, then use the peeler to slice thin slices of the turmeric flesh. Drop the thin slices of turmeric into the lime juice. If you don't have enough lime juice to cover, add more. Store in the fridge til the next day.

2. Day of: Make the laksa paste: combine all the laksa ingredients in a food processor and puree until you have a fairly smooth paste (see picture below, it won't be perfectly smooth.)
3. Heat a soup pot over medium heat and add the laska paste. (You don't need to add more oil because this is already full of oil, remember?) Fry, stirring often, until fragrant, about 10 minutes.

4. While the laksa paste is frying, dry-fry the tofu in another saute pan. (Dry frying is exactly what it sounds like, google it if you're not familiar.)

5. When the laksa paste is fragrant, stir in the coconut milk, the broth, the extra tsp of galangal and lemongrass, and bring to a simmer. Allow to simmer while you do the rest of the things.

6. Prepare the rice noodles according to the package. Mine said to boil for 5 minutes, so I boiled the kale together with the rice noodles. Rinse with cold water and drain thoroughly.
7. Stir all mix-ins into the broth: tofu, noodles, kale, snap peas, and tomato. (No need to cook snap peas & tomato ahead of time, they both cook fast in the broth.)
8. Simmer for a couple more minutes.

9. To serve: top each serving with several shreds of turmeric pickle. Don't skip this step, the acidity from the lime juice really brings out a lot of the flavor in the soup.
--------

Whew. That was tiring to write out! Couple more pictures from the process:

The yellow liquid there is the lime juice-- it turned the most amazing yellow color because of the turmeric. (The orange slices in there.)

Laksa ingredients in the food processor pre-processing. The huge pile of orange shreds is all the fresh turmeric I put in.

After pureeing. You see it's still pretty chunky, like curry paste.
------------------------

This was really a lot of fun to put together, and I feel like it turned my whole crummy day around. Fresh turmeric is really neat... it tastes sort of like a fragrant slightly spicy carrot. The pickle is nice on its own but soooo incredibly sour that I could only eat a couple of slices of it alone. So glad that I made the soup to put it in.

The Emperor initially wouldn't try the soup, but then proceeded to eat a bunch of snap peas and a ton of the tofu out of it. He got a serious turmeric ring around his mouth. He also tried a piece of turmeric pickle, which was hilarious. His face puckered up, he closed one eyelid, opened it while closing the other eyelid, and repeated a couple of times. Like out of sync blinking. Then he said, quite thoughtfully, "I'm eating... sour." Ha ha. Indeed, guy. You ARE eating sour.

Speaking of the Emperor, here's today's picture. He takes his cooking in his play kitchen very seriously, as you can see from the look on his face:

Vegan MoFo: Pesto & Peas (S is for Sorrel)

2011-10-19T19:13:00.001-07:00

It's sort of embarrassing to talk about now, but I wasn't really into vegetables before I moved to California. What makes it particularly embarrassing is that, well, I was a vegetarian before I moved here. For a long time. For, um, 13 years. And I really almost never bought or ate vegetables at home. I was what I like to think of as a potato chip vegetarian, a vegetarian who subsists on things like, well, potato chips. And frozen fake meats and ranch dressing. And bread.

Moving to California kind of blew me away because something about the combination of living close to where every kind of produce grows & living in a more affluent area means that even crappy grocery stores are full of this amazingly beautiful produce. I used to go into Safeway and just stand there and gawk. And then I discovered local Santa Cruz grocery stores. And THEN I discovered the farmer's markets and joined a CSA. And I simultaneously and magically became a vegan!

Here's what I got at the market today. This is pretty typical though I actually bought kinda lightly today because I don't need that many things for the rest of my MoFo week. You can see how if one was not a vegetable person (OR a fruit person; I almost never bought and ate fruit!) how seeing this sorta stuff all around you could be totally amazing, right?

For the first couple of years I lived here, I had a game I played where every time I went to the market. I would try to find, buy, and consume one thing I'd never had before. This drove me to try all sorts of things I adore now... persimmons, pomelos, sunchokes, parsnips, collards, pluots (PLUOTS!), guava, cherimoya, feijoas, mustard greens, shiitake mushrooms, shallots, broccolini, bok choy, and on and on and on. It's getting harder now that I've lived here so long and have eaten so many things, and I don't actively push to do it every week anymore.

So you can imagine how excited I am when I realize there's something I haven't had, and what a nice treat it is to try something new! Which is exactly what I did today for the letter S. I tried sorrel!

I tried a little bit of it raw. It's... hm. Kind of lemony? But also astringent and kind of bitter. Like a lemon with all the happiness sucked out. Um, I didn't dislike it. But it's a little intense on its own.

I perused a couple of sites of sorrel recipes on the internet, discarded a bunch for soup (it's hot out again), found a very not vegan friendly pesto recipe and decided to modify that. And then I saw snap peas, which ALSO start with S and which are a known love, so I decided to include those too.

Pesto & Peas & Pasta (Sorrel & Snaps & Spirals)
Serves 4

Pesto:
2c coarsely chopped sorrel (1 smallish bunch)
1/4c coarsely chopped parsley
1/4c walnuts
1/4c cashews
1/4c olive oil
3 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tbsps nooch
1 tsp salt
couple of grinds of pepper
juice of 1/2 lemon

Pasta:
1/2lb brown rice spirals, or other pasta of your liking

Peas:
olive oil spray
1/2lb snap peas, chopped
juice of 1/2 lemon
salt

Optional mix in: nice heirloom tomato, chopped

1. Make the pesto: put all of the pesto ingredients in a food processor and puree til fairly smooth. Taste for salt and pepper and maybe more lemon juice. Put pesto in the fridge til you're ready to eat.
2. Make the pasta according to package directions, then drain and set aside.
3. Make the peas: spray large saute pan with a light coat of olive oil spray and heat over medium.
4. Add snap peas & saute for about 5 minutes, til bright green but not limp.
5. Sprinkle lemon juice and a bit of salt (to taste) on the snap peas.
6. Mix pesto into pasta, then mix snap peas into that.
7. If using tomato (I had it with, Josh had it without), mix that in too.

Here it is in the food processor.

I really liked this but suspected I'd be the only person in the house who'd be interested in it. And indeed, the Emperor wouldn't try it. (I had set some plain noodles aside for him in anticipation, and he ate every last one of those. He is a fiend for brown rice spirals.) But Josh liked it quite a bit, which is a surprise because he's not a big pesto guy. It was really nicely creamy and well balanced without being overwhelmingly anything.

The Emperor started out dinner by telling me with extreme certainty, "I don't want snap peas. I don't LIKE snap peas. I DON'T LIKE SNAP PEAS." I was, at the time, holding one out to him. I went to put it back on my plate and his hand flashed out and snatched the pea away from me. I guess his brain was saying something other than his mouth, because he jammed the snap pea in and started chewing with a thoughtful look on his face. He then proceeded to demand and eat every last snap pea out of my dish. "Mommy, I'm eating snap peas! I REALLY LIKE SNAP PEAS. I like them! I'm eating them!" Ha ha ha. You little nut.

We had dessert tonight, because strawberries also start with S and I was (p)syched to see them at the market still. At the end of OCTOBER! You don't need a recipe for this, it's really just a layer of chocolate, a layer of dandies, and a layer of strawberries. But it was also phenomenal. Pictures:

Unfortunately, it was really dark out by the time we cut into this so the slice picture really doesn't do it justice. It's very pretty as well as tasty. And so simple and easy to make.

Whew. This may be my longest MoFo post yet. I'll end it here with a picture of the Emperor toting around a kabocha squash. J always calls him pumpkin, so I like to think of this picture as Pumpkin with pumpkin:

Vegan MoFo: Rosemary Apple Potato Rosti (R is for Rosemary)

2011-10-18T18:53:00.000-07:00

The past week has been way too warm for me. Even outside of pregnancy, I don't like being hot; during pregnancy, my tolerance drops or maybe it's that my ability to regulate temperature just fails... either way, being hot makes me crabby. It also makes cooking really terribly unappealing. So I'm delighted to report that today was cool and moist, not rainy so much as misty. I was ready for this.

And it couldn't have lined up more perfectly with today's MoFo, which features one of my favorite things in the world: rosemary!

Josh likes to give me a hard time because I'm always saying things are my favorite. But really, rosemary is up there. It's like nutmeg, I'll put it in basically anything. Sometimes when I have a lot of it, I set some aside and just chew the needles on it. When I was a little kid, I used to really like to make rosemary tea... just rosemary steeped in boiling water with a little sweetener. (Haven't thought about that in a long time. It actually sounds really good right now!)

Of course, I wanted to do something slightly more challenging than just steeping rosemary in hot water for MoFo, heh. Especially since I was passing up a lot of other lovely R items (rhubarb, rutabaga, raisins, relish, etc) for rosemary!

I finally settled on a dish out of this week's PPK Cookbook Challenge book, 500 Vegan Recipes: Rosemary Apple Potato Rosti!

Basically a big cake of shredded potato, apple, onion, and rosemary. Oh, and I put tempeh bacon in mine too because that's just the way I roll. This was such a good recipe: insanely easy (even without a shredding attachment on my food processor), very filling, so potato-y and warm. I was worried that the apple and onion would make it really sweet, but it wasn't sweet at all. Just really good.

Oh, I subbed in fresh rosemary for the dried here. When you use fresh herbs, they're much more delicious but you also need to use more... so instead of 1.5 tsps in the original recipe, I put in... I don't know... maybe a half cup of very finely minced rosemary? Most of a bunch. Wasn't overpowering at all.

The Emperor has been extremely resistant to potatoes lately (yes! potatoes! the food EVERY kid likes!) so I didn't expect him to try this. But he ran into the kitchen shouting "I want to sit in Daddy's chair! I want to eat Daddy's dinner!" and so we let him sit up in J's chair, whereupon he dug into J's serving of rosti with relish. He ate quite a bit of it, stopping to tell me several times, "I'm eating potatoes!" with delight. It was really funny, especially because he really makes a point of enunciating potato... pah-tay-toe. Well, maybe you had to be here...

Here's your bonus picture for tonight. We took it sitting on the couch in the dark living room, hence graininess. He took a bunch of them himself tonight, I'm not sure if this was one of them or not.

Vegan MoFo: Quince-glazed black bean cutlets (Q is for Quince)

2011-10-17T20:09:00.000-07:00

Q is a tough letter. I could only think of two ways to go with it-- quinoa, that darling of the vegan set, or quince, a fruit I'd never had before. I saw quince somewhere recently and wanted to buy it but didn't... so thought I'd go ahead and do that for MoFo since it was a little more exciting.

But as you can see from my picture, I couldn't find an actual fresh quince when I went looking for one! In hindsight, I think the place I saw it was probably the farmer's market... as for when I saw it, I know I'm one of those infuriating people who use "recently" to catalog oh, any time in the past year or two, so for all I know this could have been September that I saw the quince. September last year. Heh. In any case, I couldn't find any fresh to work with, but after reading a bit on quince's use, decided that was okay. Quince is super super astringent, so aside from a very, very few varieties, it's never eaten fresh. You always have to cook it to reduce the astringency and make it delicious, and most of the time it ends up in jam. So I just went out and bought jam.

I ended up making a glaze out of the quince jam and some leftover port and using that to glaze black bean cutlets. They were going to be chickpea cutlets initially but um, I'm out of chickpeas somehow. (Also: I am out of quinoa, which is why our Q dinner ended up accompanied by couscous instead! The vegan staples in my house are dwindling!) The cutlets are basically a double recipe of the Veganomicon chickpea cutlets made with black beans instead and with the spices adjusted (no thyme etc, just a little pinch of allspice instead) so I'm not going to post that here, but I will post the glaze recipe as it's quite lovely and simple.

Quince-port glaze
6 tbsps quince jam
3 tbsps ruby port
2 stars worth of star anise
generous grinding of black pepper

1. Combine all ingredients in a small saucepan and whisk til well combined and smooth.
2. Heat over medium-low until gently boiling; continue to simmer for about 10 minutes, until somewhat reduced, whisking often. (It will seem thinner than when you started, but will thicken upon cooling.)
3. Use a pastry brush to brush glaze onto black bean cutlets or other pieces of protein and then either eat directly or broil for 1-1.5 minutes each side. (Watch closely, because the glaze will burn quite easily under the broiler.)

I have to tell you, I am always a bit wary of sweet components in savory dishes. Like when I see mangos in a savory dish? I always cringe. My inner toddler does not want different things combined like that. So I wasn't really sure that I'd come out liking this dish. It was actually quite nice... the taste reminded me a bit of a non-spicy General Tso's sauce or of this orange glazed vegan chicken dish that Nancy Chang's in Worcester, MA makes. And I liked the slightly crispy-crunchy texture of the broiled glaze. The star anise was great, not at all overpowering alongside the quince & port. Mmm, star anise.

The Emperor quite liked the cutlet (which he identified instantly as seitan) and also ate some broccoli. But his crazy mother (me) mixed the whole wheat couscous and the broccoli together and though he likes the two apart, he was NOT pleased that there were "cuckoos" on his broccoli. He ate a couple of pieces that he painstakingly picked every grain of couscous off, but after that he left it. Oh well, I liked them together and thought it was nice to save on washing one more dish by steaming the couscous and the broccoli together.

Last but not least: your bonus picture! I get home from work a couple hours before everyone else. Every day when he gets home from preschool, the Emperor runs up to the front door and knocks vigorously. I then shout "who is it!" and peer around the blind of the front door. He peers around from his side. We both laugh hysterically. It's one of the best parts of my day and this is what it looks like from my end:

Link love (liebster!)

2011-10-17T06:37:00.000-07:00

Two people, the lovely and talented Lauren of Where the Veggies Are and Michelle of A Bit Addicted to Cookbooks, recently linked to me as part of the MoFo Liebster award meme thingy. What is that? Just another way of saying "I love you!" to other internet vegans and getting the word out about some blogs you like that other people might not have seen yet.

Here is the standard info:

"Liebster" is German for 'dearest' or 'beloved' but it can also mean 'favorite'. The idea behind this award is to bring attention to blogs with fewer than 200 followers and show some support.

The rules of winning this award are as follows:

1. Show your thanks to the blogger who gave you the award by linking back to them.
2. Reveal 5 of your top picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.
3. Post the award on your blog.
4. Enjoy the love and support of some wonderful people on the www!

I had such a hard time picking out just five blogs that I've loved during MoFo this year! Also, I am not really sure that these are all under 200 followers (some sites seem to display that info prominently, some don't) so if you're on this list and you actually have 6,012 followers, sorry, I'm not underestimating you, I just love you so much I had to share you!

Anyway, 5 blogs that have just really tickled me during MoFo this year:

Fork & Beans - seriously my favorite MoFo theme (series of themes?) of the year

One Arab Vegan - everything she posts looks amazing and delicious, and often she posts detailed steps & pictures with recipes, which I love.

Veganize This - I have really enjoyed seeing Mel's very different interpretation of the same alphabet I've been cooking through!

The Crabby Crafter - delicious looking food and cute toddler pictures. It's like my blog, but with TWO cute kids.

Joyfulgirl - all pumpkin all month long, AND the world's cutest kitten to boot. Go for the cat pictures, stay for the food.

Okay! That's all for now! Until tonight when we return with the letter Q.